Tell me if I follow correctly: Do you do the test only on users that have their own PC with them? So if you happen to be in a store where nobody has a machine or is willing to take the test, then, tough luck?
Why worry about having the users test in their own environment (PC)? The focus of the test is on usability. Testing to see if the site works properly across different systems should be part of QA work and can be done separately.
In reading articles and books — over time, I’ve learned to try to avoid beginning a sentence with “There” and using “is” or “are.” Doing this enriches your writing and encourages you to find more interesting verbs.
Write and Drop or Substitute
When I catch myself writing, “There are…” or “There is…” I complete the sentence. For example, “There are many books about computers.” Then, I rewrite it to drop “There are” and start the sentence with “Many” or substitute “There” with something else.
“Many books about computers …”
“The library carries many books about computers…”
Manuscript Analyzer can help dump those trouble words and phrases. It looks for frequently-used words and “identify junk phrases, ‘frequent offender’ word patterns, and adverbs.”
“Got” Has Got to Go
Use other verbs in place of “got” or “get” as another way to strengthen your sentence.
Instead of …
“He got a new car.”
Use …
“He bought a new car” or “He received a new car” (lucky guy!)
“Got” Gotcha
Need to add a gotcha based on work I’m doing for a client’s Web content. I’ve used “get” a few times because I don’t want to use “receive” too many times.
Other words such as “obtain, be given, accept, collect” don’t do the job. They feel awkward, they don’t flow naturally, or they don’t work.
“So you can receive what you need… ” doesn’t work as “So you can accept or collect what you need.”
In other words — you don’t have to kill “get” — but avoid it where possible or use it less.
Grandpa Henry hands over his restaurant to Ginger to do with as she pleases. The catch: Grandpa’s restaurant needs a lot of work. Well, hey, it doesn’t cost us anything to get a restaurant. So Ginger (us players) goes to work for Chuck Bergerman (har har, nice pun, designers) to earn money to revamp Grandpa’s restaurant as well as learn her way around the kitchen.
Here, we don’t just run around the kitchen and fulfill customer orders. A level starts with a customer’s face popping up along with a cartoon bubble that lists all the steps and ingredients in the requested dish. A step typically consists of the ingredients to find and ends with cooking the collected ingredients or delivering the dish to the customer.
In every level, the ingredients move around the kitchen. As we work in new restaurants, the kitchen set up also changes. The stove might be on the right in one restaurant and on the left in another. So don’t get too comfy. Impossible to get bored!
You get a feel for where some ingredients will appear, so it’s not as difficult as it sounds. As you cook more recipes, you earn new recipes and ingredients. The kitchen looks barren early in the game and overflows with ingredients later on.
Before you tackle the second or third step with your first customer, customer #2 pops in. Now we must manage two orders at the same time. Be ready to manage up to four customer orders. Sounds frantic, but it’s so much fun.
Don’t expect fake recipes here. The recipes for the dishes look authentic and come to life with a photo as you deliver them to customers. As we gain experience, we move to another restaurant serving different type of food. Ginger learns Pan-Asian, vegetarian, Parisian, seafood, English cooking.
A mini-game comes in every handful of levels. One mini-game calls for catching flying items, another requires you to find ingredients as fast as you can… in the dark. These fit the game nicely and involve memorizing anything like many mini-games tend to do.
As you successfully deliver customer orders, you receive tips. Those tips go toward remodeling Grandpa’s restaurant. On occasion, Ginger hears from, but he doesn’t hear so well during the phone calls. The story moves along smoothly between levels as Ginger converses with her bosses.
However, the game has a typo or two. Tiny nitpick considering the superb quality of the game. Before finishing the game, I had already decided I want another game… and there just might be.
By the end, I feel like a pro especially when I wildly managed multiple complicated customer orders. I memorized some recipes I ran for the first ingredient as soon as I saw the customer’s order and before checking the list of ingredients.
Boy, I wish this feeling would carry over into real life. Cooking in Go Go Gourmet almost makes me want to return to cooking real meals for the family. That’s almost — something about actually chopping and shopping for fresh ingredients doesn’t have the appeal of doing it virtually.
The ingredients of good music, high addiction factor, sharp graphics, and original concept make an award-winning recipe in Go Go Gourmet. Please, sir developer, may I have some more?
Bulleted lists on Web pages help readers scan and find what they want. Two situations that do well with bulleted lists are series and instructions. Also, beware of indenting, spacing, formatting, and whitespace.
Series
For situations where three or more items appear separated by commas, they might work better as a list. Instead of, “Bring an apple, orange, and banana” use…
Bring:
apple
orange
banana
This doesn’t need numbers as order has no impact. The space between “Bring” and the list might be too much as people might not instantly associate the two with the distance, but CSS can fix this.
Instructions
When steps call for doing tasks in a specific order, numbered bullets work well. eHow.com does this nicely. Take care in situations where you have a choice. For example…
Peel apple.
Cut apple using one of the following ways:
Dice the apples using the chopper.
Cut the apple in half. Cut both halves in half for four wedges. If you want smaller wedges, cut the four wedges in half.
Serve.
With instructions, you can also clarify a choice like this:
Dice the apples using the chopper.
or
Cut the apple in half. Cut both halves in half again for four wedges.
In this version, it’s clear you have a choice since “or” separates the choices.
Indenting
Notice Step 2 takes up more than one line and uses the indent? Some sites don’t indent lines beyond the first and it’s hard on scanning like this:
1. Dice the apples using the chopper.
2. Cut the apple in half. Cut both halves in half for four wedges. If you want smaller wedges, cut the four wedges in half.
Spacing and Long Lists
It’s also possible to break up a long series such as what to pack for sleep away camp. That list can easily get long. Break up the series by categories (i.e. clothes, toiletries, linens). Also, instead of one long list — put the list into columns to avoid wasting white space.
Furthmore, the list divides into three categories. Can’t do more than one column simply because the content space is narrow. Plus, some of them have comments.
The week ends with an appropriate game… football. February 3 is the day of the Super Bowl in the U.S. Remember the deal is good on Game du Jour for one day only.
Bill Moore of RadioTime shared his experience of gathering feedback from users in a sandwich shop. It’s amazing how easy it is to get user feedback with zero overhead, that’s cheap, and leads to actionable results.
I asked him why didn’t he go to the (in)famous coffee shop since their wi-fi usually works well (wi-fi in the sandwich place was flaky). He said the coffee shop is louder. At the sandwich shop, people stay longer and the tables are bigger.
RadioTime.com offers a free complete guide to radio and sells a product that lets you record radio just like TiVO records TV. When doing on location testing, consider the following:
Pay attention to time and setting: People are less likely to be in a hurry at lunchtime than in the morning before work, for example.
Make testing clear before starting: Be upfront about time commitment, what you’re doing and why, what the user will do, and any other relevant information. RadioTime lets the user know that there’s nothing to download.
Keep notes: Be ready by having a form and a clipboard. Perhaps, consider recording the user’s feedback with a non-intrusive recorder. Use a clipboard in case you can’t access the table when making notes.
Talk with the store manager: This assures the store that you’re not doing anything suspicious and plus you’re building a relationship.
Wear logo or display company badge: Helps with trust and credibility.
Here’s what Bill said about doing testing in the sandwich shop.
The hidden object-based Dream Day series begins with marriage and follows with the honeymoon. Jenny and Robert take the next big step in a marriage: Buying their first home. In Dream Day First Home, they need our help renovating, redecorating, and dealing with crises.
The creators behind the series continue to add new features to keep the monotony away. At the start, we get to select one of two homes that need a little fixin’ and lovin’. One is a home from the 1930s craftsman and the other is Victorian style. If you’re indecisive like — no worries, you can play both. Pick one and you’ll do the other later.
Like most hidden object games, you search for specific items in the rooms of Jenny and Robert’s new home or at specialty stores like the cookware, hardware, and garden stores to get supplies.
Whether you’re in a hurry or not depends on if you’re playing timed or relaxed mode. Timed mode — although more challenging — offers a few twists. For one, every few levels you receive a special item that adds one minute to the clock. You must remember the item because it won’t appear in the list of hidden objects. When found, the clock gains one minute.
The best twist of all comes in the superclues. These hidden objects take two steps to solve. For example, you need to find a screwdriver. Since screwdriver appears in a blue font (different from the rest), it indicates it’s a superclue item. The scene has a toolbox, so click the toolbox to open it and reveal a screwdriver. Click that and the game crosses off screwdriver from the list.
As with its predecessors, this one lets you receive more hints — this time it’s golden eggs. Each egg adds more liquid into a test tube, and when it fills — the number of available hints goes up by one. Use a hint whenever you need help and the bird shows you the way.
Also new in Dream Day First Home is The Attic Mini Games. This contains three puzzles that you can play up to four times each.
Perfect Match: This mini game hasn’t changed from earlier Dream Day games. It requires making pairs of matches (like Concentration).
Puzzle Garden: Pair up two items that go together like match with a matchbox and rain with umbrella.
Fix-R-Upper: Not really a game, but resembles a slot machine. You spin for new furniture and the slot gives you design options. You can lock and unlock three slots and spin three times. If you don’t like the result, you can play again.
Again, the piano supports the game’s classy style with classical music. Classical music may not fit many people’s tastes, but it works lovely with the Dream Day series. The series also has great storylines where we contribute by picking one of three events. Dream Day First Home tells the story of Jenny and Robert moving into their home, redecorating and interacting with their community.
Dream Day games don’t last long by hidden object standards. However, Dream Day First Home lasts longer because of the two homes. Complete both homes to reveal a surprise at the end.
My “Robert” loves hidden object games and this one caught his eye. He started playing where I left off! Talk about testing a marriage He and I have the same complaint about the game — repeated use of rooms and objects in the same place. While it’s acceptable to re-use rooms and objects, this Dream Day First Home does it too early in the game and too often.
One other issue — the game would not run on a computer running Vista. It freezes near the beginning. The system requirements say the game can run on Vista, so try before you buy.
The Dream Day franchise continues to stay strong with the new features of superclues and Fix-R-Upper mini game that lets you design new furniture. We don’t feel like the developer took short cuts to release another game by slapping a new story on an old formula. Three words describe Dream Day First Home: Warm, sweet, and fun.
Since taking a class that discussed Edward Tufte’s work, I’ve been fascinated by turning information into visual data. His site contains many examples that you could easily spend hours on the site. I have. Plus, I spent several days browsing sites with articles, resources, and examples of infovis (information visualization) in action.
It’s not just about presenting data in a presentation. Infovis also helps us find and understand things quicker With the growing implementation of electronic dashboards, we need to learn how to create effective visual representations of data to make the most of dashboard technology.
It’s a struggle for me as I haven’t practiced this process or created any charts in a long time. Here are examples and resources for inspiration and learning.
AInews.org: Note the .org! Use the other and you’ll get an R-rated surprise. Simple news headlines appears in different sizes. Mouse over a headline for a summary or click the + to save it (up to 10).
AntarcticAnimation: “Reveals the profound human connections that some have made with Antarctica’s changing landscape.” Animations and map.
Atlas of Cyberspaces “is atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and other emerging Cyberspaces.”
Books That Make You Dumb: Of course, reading them won’t lower your IQ — little humor, y’know? This chart comes from data based on books read in college and comparing that to SAT scores. The higher a book scores, the smarter it is.
Candidate Match Game: Very cool tool from USA Today that’s not a game, but more a tool to help you see which candidates share your opinions on big issues. It’s the chart that appears after you complete the questions that amazes.
Martin Wattenberg research projects list includes History Wired is a visual exploration of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s holdings that seeks to reproduce the serendipity experienced when browsing in a physical museum, History Flow, QuerySketch, and Map of the Market.
Perceptual Edge has examples of turning data into visual information and before and after examples to show how to better tell the story behind the data. Participants in its forums discuss good and bad examples.
Visuwords online graphical dictionary and thesaurus
Washington DC Metro Maps helped me get around Washington, DC for six years. The hardest part was figuring out the end of the route so I could ensure I got on the right train.
We Feel Fine: An exploration of human emotions in six movements.
Future Feeder: Discusses impact of information and computation on architecture.
Indexed : “This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.”
ProcessingBlogs and ProcessingHacks: Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound.
If a blog isn’t listed — it may be too new, hasn’t been updated in a long time, doesn’t have enough entries. Of course, I may have simply missed it. Please add it in comments or email me.
Beyond Bullet Points teaches how to tell a story with PowerPoint without resorting to useless templates. Think of it as presentation turned into visuals.
Bob Horn is an expert on visual argumentation mapping and his site posts speeches, articles, and examples including the cool home page.
Gapminder is a non-profit organization that uses data visualization to get its message across. Hans Rosling, co-founder of the organization, turns boring numbers into animation to help us make sense of the world especially in Gapminder World.
generator.x : Examines role of software and generative strategies in art and design. Associated blog.
Visual Editors “is the online classroom and meeting hall where student and working journalists from newsrooms around the world come to study the latest reporting, editing and design techniques, story forms, media trends, and interactive strategies.”
Visual Literacy: eLearning tutorial on visualization that also has a periodic table of visualization methods in its maps section.