Some of the best feedback you can ever receive on your product is the unsolicited and indirect kind. Lets face it, most people are more honest about their opinions when there are no hurt feelings at stake.  Have you ever wondered what people are saying about you, your company, or your product when you’re not around? I dont know about you, but if somebody says something about anything I’ve ever worked on, I want to know about it.

Companies are getting smarter about tracking what is said about them on them on web.

My good friend Greg over at Urban Monarch likes to write posts that go something like…”{ company name }, if you can hear me, we’d really like { product name } to review on our site”. 9 times out of 10, the company will contact them for an address of where to send the product. Hey Greg…post a comment if you find this post (i dont think he follows my blog).

Recently, i posted a tweet on twitter…”I’m excited to make my first screencast using Screenflow”. A couple of hours later, i get a reply tweet from the makers of screenflow saying “let us know how it goes…and be sure to post your work on our screencast site…”. I was floored and instantly compelled to provide feedback to them on anything and everything Screenflow. Hey Vara Software, post a reply if you find this post.

How are companies doing this? Are they telepathic?
What worked for Miss Cleo does not work for all (Miss Cleo, post a reply if you sense this post). The trick here is to get the feedback to come to you so you are not spending a lot of precious time scouring the internet for related feedback. There’s no better technology for this than RSS. Here’s a few of the most effective tools I have found so far:

1. Twitter
   You can track tweets on twitter by typing in “track” followed by “search term”….so “track user kind” will send me updates to any posts that contain “user kind”. You can also track any activity on your twitter username: “track @twitterUserName”.
2. search.twitter.com
   Search all tweets and subscribe to the results via RSS
3. FriendFeed
   FriendFeed aggregates information from a bunch of different social networks and websites…twitter, flickr, facebook, blogs, and 40 or so others. This is probably the most useful site for keeping track of what is said because you can type in any search term, and subscribe to the results as an RSS feed. For example, here’s what people are saying about Screenflow
4. Technorati
   Want to track what people blog about you? Try searching Technorati and subscribe to the results as an RSS feed.
5. Google Blog Search
   Another blog search engine where you can subscribe to the results via RSS
6. BlogPulse
   Track conversations and subscribe to the results via RSS

There you have it. You are now armed with some great tools on getting more in tune with what people are saying about you on the interwebs. If you know of any others, please post em!

My good colleague Oliver just linked me to this awesome wirefaming stencil kit from Yahoo!. These stencils contain just about every common element you’d need for wireframing anything from websites to iPhone apps. They even provide all kinds of different formats (Visio, PDF, SVG…to name a few).

Here’s a list of the different stencils located in the zip file:

 Here’s some direct download links:
OmniGraffle
Visio (XML)
PDF
PNG
SVG

I’ve discovered some pretty slick and painless ways to recruit participants for your usability test. Google recently released an easy way to create a questionnaire and have the posted form automatically fill out your Google spreadsheet.
Heres how you get started:

Step 1) Create a google spreadsheet

Step 2) Create your questionnaire form

Now you can create any combination of text entry, multiple choice, check-box based, or “choose from a list” based questions your potential participants will answer for you.

Step 3) Preview your form and copy the link

Step 4) Create a craigslist posting under Computer Gigs or related area for your test. Paste a link to your form in the craigslist posting as the only way to contact you.

Step 5) Watch the results populate in your spreadsheet

Now you’re all set and every time someone fills out the form, the results are magically posted to your google spreadsheeet. You can set up notifications on the spreadsheet so that you’re emailed as soon as there’s a posting.

This takes the time and hassle out of creating a contact sheet of usability participants.

I’ve been doing a lot of usability testing on the mac lately and have learned a lot from it. One of the best things I’ve learned is that even though the mac is the most expensive computing platform, it is the cheapest to conduct a quality usability test on. Here’s why:

Recruiting: Craigslist – $Free (I offer $50 per person that comes in)
Mac users are passionate about using a mac. A quick post titled “Mac users needed” on the computer gigs section offering $50 for 90 minutes of your time yields dozens of responses from a diverse crowd in less than 24 hours. I’ve created a form that i point the craigslist posting to which asks some simple questions related to the type of user i’m looking to test.

Screen recording software: Screenflow – $100

Screenflow, only available for Leopard, is awesome because it allows you to capture the entire screen, internal audio, audio from your computer’s mic, and video from your iSight…all at the same time while running un-noticed in the background. You can even go back and edit it down with some simple features. For $100 this is a very powerful usability tool. The downside of Screenflow is that it takes a long time to export as a quicktime movie. An hour long usability test might take 6 hours to export on my macbook pro. I tried exporting the same clip from the new 8-core mac pro and it still takes a couple hours.
iShowU is a more dumbed down screencasting software that solves the export problem by creating the .mov file on the fly…so as soon as you hit stop, the file is ready to be watched in quicktime.

The Tests

Since I myself do the moderation and everything is recorded, it doesn’t need to involve anybody else’s time. This means that to conduct a full-on usability session of 8 recruits only costs $500. Compare that to the $10,000-15,000 cost of hiring someone to do the recruiting, renting a usability lab with all the equipment, and force 5 of your co-workers to sit behind a 2-way mirror for 8 hours. Seems like a pretty compelling alternative.

Tips for setting up your test mac

• Make sure to disable any Expose hot spots in the preferences…people use this differently and it can get annoying pretty quick if windows start flying around in the middle of a test.
• If you use a mighty mouse, or any mouse with a middle click, be sure to disable the middle click. I have my middle click set to trigger the dashboard so its good to prevent someone from triggering it unintentionally in a test.
• This may be obvious, but be sure to close your instant messaging software like Adium or iChat.
• Its always a good idea to do a restart before a test…who knows what type of processes are lingering that could hinder performance or cause a crash. Its safe to start with a clean system.

I am about to embark on a pretty exciting usability study on some software we’ve been working on at Blue Lava Technologies. Since I will mostly be conducting usability testing on my own (everything from recruiting people to moderation and reports), I need a way to capture the user sessions on the computer so I can focus on moderating instead of being distracted by taking notes. Its also good to capture the sessions so that the team can review them when they have a chance (though in my experience nobody ever does).

My requirements for this software are pretty basic:

• Must not impact performance at all…should run completely transparent in the background
• Record the entire screen at a real-time frame rate so that mouse movements are clear
• Record the audio from my laptop mic (or external mic if needed)
• output a video file that can be reviewed later

I’ve done testing in the past that captures a video of the person’s face along with the screen so you can see physical reactions, but this has never really added that much value. Just observing the mouse movements alone can give you great insight to what the user is thinking.
Since I’ll be testing a mac application, this limits the options available for me to use quite a bit…but the funny thing is, I found IShowU, a $25 piece of software, to be the best solution.

I have tested it for hours at a time with no problems…and it is very configurable to suit a lot of different needs.

I love products that do 1 thing great…and this is one of em.

The president at the start-up I’m working for, Lorenz, has been ranting and raving about how awesome Facebook is…so much that we’re starting to wonder if he is secretly working for them. Though I still don’t quite understand what the buzz is all about yet, he recently found and used their polling feature that I find amazing.

For as little as $6, you can poll Facebook’s 30 million users to get insight on questions you may need answers to without going through all the trouble of usability testing or traditional (and expensive) polling methods.

We tried a few questions and got several hundred responses very quickly. Overall I find it extremely useful and will definitely be using it a lot to assist in some of those difficult design decisions.

UPDATE:

Ok now that I’ve been using Facebook for the past couple of weeks, I can see the light now. From the time I registered to now, I’ve added about 5 friends on my own, but other friends and friends of friends have quickly found me and added me to their friends list. I was quite amazed at how quickly and easily they help you and your friends connect (via your IM, email contacts, etc…). Once you have a decent amount of friends you’re connected to, Facebook gets really awesome.

Facebook is one million times better than myspace. Granted I’m not a popularity-starved teenager who wants to pimp out my profile beyond the point of legibility, but the usability and thought they’ve put into every detail in order to enable a great social network is really impressive.

One of the biggest usability problems you encounter in a fully Ajaxified site (i.e., a completely dynamic site that functions with little to no page refreshes)…is the fact that anything you load dynamically on the page without a refresh is blind to the browser’s buttons, as well as bookmarking.

Kailash however has discovered a slick way around this problem in this post. He mentions that by making use of the ‘url fragment identifier’ or whatever that comes after the # in a url, you can use javascript to dynamically update the url in the browser’s address bar:

Javascript can update the fragment identifier dynamically with a simple

On page load, something like RegEx could be used to parse the query

So if page numbers or required variables are set as the fragment identifiers, it is possible to efficiently make Javascript process it (nearly) and make Ajax act normal with page urls.

On another note, Smugmug has released a new version of their site that is proof positive that this technique can sucessfully be done. Well done! I’m really excited to start using this technique on our projects over at Blue Lava.

Today Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google announced that they will be releasing the much speculated powerpoint version of their free online apps for small businesses. This is very exciting news for those of us who have been fully enjoying Gmail, Docs, and Spreadsheets…and more importantly those of us who use Visio.

It has been said in the past that Power Point can be a great tool for creating wireframes and other types of bare-bones visualization methods. Though I’ve always used Visio in the past, I could see this new online tool being extremely useful for throwing together some quick diagrams.

Altia has released a photoshop plugin called PhotoProto that allows you to turn your photoshop documents into working prototypes. It is a script that you run that takes advantage of layers and layer comps, turning them on and off as you click around your mockup. The demo makes it look like it’s very easy to use. You can even make changes to your photoshop document without affecting the prototype.

Check out the demo video for more info.

If you’re ever struggling to find the right way to display and visualize data, have a glance at this page for some ideas:

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

They’ve broken it out in a periodic table fashion with slick rollovers that reveal a screenshot of the visualization.