Usability testing with Silverback
Back in April I attended Future of Web Design 2008; a two day event with a conference on Thursday and Workshops on Friday. On the Friday afternoon I attended a session on Guerrilla Usability Testing run by Andy Budd from Clear Left.
Usability testing is something I’ve been itching to do properly for years; I’ve been trying to sell the idea to various bosses ever since I read Steve Krug’s excellent Don’t Make Me Think.
Andy’s session demonstrated that effective usability testing really is within reach. He started off with a real world example - getting people who don’t drink much wine to evaluate three different bottle openers. This had the rather pleasing upshot of there being several open bottles of wine that needed consuming during the course of the afternoon. From there Andy moved on to the main presentation which was informative and entertaining, you can see a version of the slides he used here.
At the end of the session Andy announced that Silverback, the application that clear left had been making a noise about for a couple of months was in fact
read onA quick tip for traveling abroad with gadgets
If you’re anything like me (by which I don’t mean greying & fat) then you’ll probably take more than a couple of gadgets on holiday with you. This can cause issues when trying to charge them all at the end of the day.
This year the solution hit me - rather than taking a load of adapter plugs I just took one and plugged a UK 6 way extension cable in to it.
I realise that this isn’t an earth shattering idea but it mad my life easier.
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