UX Brighton: Local & Remote Usability Testing August 19, 2008

This sessions focusses on 2 new products for 2 types of usability testing:

1) Guerilla Usability Testing with Silverback (Andy Budd)

Usability tests are an excellent way of discovering problems with a product or service. However commissioning a dedicated usability lab can be costly and time consuming. Instead of a single academic evaluation, why not bring your usability testing in-house and run it alongside your design and development process?

Usability testing needn't cost the Earth. It's entirely possible to run a test at your own office, a cafe or even your subject's home. This is why we created Silverback, a low cost usability testing application that turns your Mac into a portable testing suite. We wanted to break the shackles of usability testing and put it back in the hands of designers and developers.

In this session Andy will give you a quick demo of Silverback and show you how to plan, set-up and run your own guerilla usability tests.

Andy Budd is an author, blogger and user experience director at Clearleft. He most recently featured as Gwyneth Paltrow's body double in the hit Movie, Iron Man.

2) Webnographer: a web app for remote testing (James Page)

This will be the first public demo of Webnographer, which will be launched in late September.

His short talk will show how Webnographer can offer fast insight into Usablity issues. He will show how Webnographer enables the collection of user behavioural data. He will also demonstrate how to gain quick insight into the user data, through Webnographer's visual representation. Finally James will give a brief overview of the academic research that Webnographer is based on, such as the link between the eye and the mouse movements.

Webnographer: Is a new service for Asynchronous Remote User Testing. Webnographer enables faster and cheaper user testing outside of the labs. The services has been designed so that a team can get results back in hours using more than the normal number of participants. Webnographer has been developed by FeraLabs, a new start-up based in Berlin and Hastings, founded by Sabrina Mach and James Page.