fordie’s blog

Last night at the Burlington Hotel, during the biggest thunderstorm so far this summer we had the first Worthing TweetUp.

Considering this is something that started as an idea I mentioned to David Rosam in passing two or three weeks ago I was pretty pleased with the turn out. David & I were there along with Jala68, Loudmouthman, Spidernix, Steaders and Clive Flint.

It was an informal event with everyone sat round a table chatting about everything from social networking to photography and the Russian Mafia! Loudmouthman managed to stream some of it to qik, and Clive has posted some photos to twitter.

We were also joined for a while by a lovely – very scared collie called bones who’d run away from her owner on the seafront during the storm.  She ran straight into the bar at the hotel & took up residence under our table.

It was really good to meet everone last night, I’m planning to arrange another meetup in a few weeks, probably at a different venue (hopefully somewhere with WiFi) so keep an eye on this blog and upcoming for more information.  Incidentally, if you are interested in sponsoring future events please get in touch.

Last year A List Apart ran a survey to try and get a picture of the state of the web design industry globally. The results made quite interesting reading.

This year, they’re doing it again, it should make for an interesting comparison.

It only takes a few minutes to complete, why not pop along and add your details to the mix?

The other day I got chatting to David Rosam on  Twitter when we discovered that we lived very close to each other.  It occurred to us that there were probably a number of other Twitter users in the area, failing that it seemed likely that there would be lots of freelancers & assorted geeks Worthing and surrounding areas.

So, we’ve decided to have a go at getting as many people together as we could.  The proposed TweetUp is an informal social event, it’s a chance to get to know your fellow geeks / freelancers / twitter users, bump your gums and press some flesh all in the pleasant surroundings of Gio’s bar at The Burlington on Worthing seafront. We’ll be there from 8pm on Wednesday the 6th of August 2008.

If this sounds like something you might be interested in then please indicate your interest on our upcoming page.

You don’t have to be a twitter user to attend, nor do you need to be a freelancer. In fact anyone is welcome to come along - who knows what might come out of it?

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 a tool for doing usability testing on the mac, and we would all be getting a beta copy to play with. As a recent mac convert I was keen to give it a spin.

At work we had already scheduled in some usability testing on the product we are developing so I was able to try Silverback out almost straight away.

Silverback is incredibly straightforward to use, you create a project and then set up a new test session with in that. In your web browser of choice you navigate to the site you’ll be testing then, when you are ready to start your test click “Start Session” in silverback, the screen fades to black with the words “press SPACEBAR to start” displayed in large friendly letters.You can pause and restart recording during the session, using your apple remote if you have one. Youcan also use your remote to mark places where your tester runs in to difficulty apparently.

Once you have finished your test you can make notes and export the session. I love the way Steve the gorilla taps his foot and drums his fingers on his clipboard while the export takes place.  What you end up is a quicktime movie like the one below with the isight & screen capture videos combined, Sweet!

My Silverback Demo

The movies are incredibly useful for understanding how users will interact with your site, they’re a very persuasive tool for getting colleagues to rethink functionality.

I think Clear Left have done a great job with Silverback, we’ll definately be buying a license when they launch the product.

A note about recording audio with the mac mini

Our mac test box in the office is a mac mini running tiger, so it has no isight camera or built in mic.  I had real fun and games trying to get the audio to work, eventually I discovered that the line in on the mac mini requires an amplified source so standard PC microphones will not work.  The best solution this problem was to purchase a USB microphone - we bought this one from Logitec it’s plug & play and works a treat.

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.