Strong as an Ox

Usability testing, as you may well know, involves you watching real users interact with your website or application so you can really see how they interact with it and how you might improve certain areas of it.

Of course, there’s no reason usability testing in software has to be restricted to just websites and applications. In Peter Seibel’s book, Coders at Work, I was interested to read Simon Peyton Jones discussing how Microsoft applies usability testing to API’s:

Well, they also do some interesting work on testing APIs. Steven Clarke and his colleagues at Redmond have made systematic attempts to watch programmers, given a new API, talk through what they’re trying to do. And they get the people who designed the API to sit behind a glass screen and watch them.

And the guys sitting there behind the glass screen say, “No, no, don’t do that! That’s not the right way!” But it’s soundproof. That turns out often to be very instructive. They go and change their API.

from Coders at Work, Chapter 7 – Simon Peyton Jones [p. 253]

If you haven’t yet got a copy of Coders at Work you can buy one from Amazon.

I don’t normally think twice about printer test pages. And, to be honest, who does? But I was setting up a new printer at home the other day on my laptop, which dual boots into Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and Windows 7 and couldn’t help but notice that stark contrast between the Windows 7 printer test page and it’s Ubuntu counterpart:

Windows 7 printer test page

Ubuntu 9.10 printer test page

I know which one I find more useful and informative

Quite often, when buying books off Amazon, you can sometimes get them cheaper by going to a marketplace seller’s own website. That’s how I came across The Book Depository, where I have bought a few books recently.

One nice UX feature that I like on this site was the way in which they highlight where to find your credit card CVV/security number depending on which credit card you are using:

Visa card with CVV number highlighted

The image above shows the security number highlighted on the signature strip when you select Visa from the credit card type drop-down list. Compare that with the screenshot below showing the security number highlighted on the front of the card when American Express is selected:

AMEX card with the CVV number highlighted

It’s a simple feature really, but nicely implemented.