Alpha, Beta, & Prototype: user research & competitive strategy

Transportation nightmares

Greg — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:11:05 +0000

The 2008 IDEA conference was a blast again this year, especially since I didn’t have to organize and work on my feet for three days in a row this time. Being my first real conference in Chicago, I decided to scout out the city and took the Chicago architecture tour and rode the L & Metra trains around the city to different neighborhoods.

In preparation for Charlotte’s World Usability Day, the annual Usability Professionals Association event, I grabbed a few extra transport maps and snapped a few pictures of transportation nightmares. Like this one:

this sign doesn't help riders decide where to stand to catch a train

Testing SMS services: Moka

Greg — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:33:13 +0000

I recently received an invite to a private beta (who hasn’t these days). The service is called Moka Groups. It used to be a book delivery by SMS service and now I don’t really know yet what it does. I think it’s now SMSifying your AIM, Gtalk, and Yahoo IM and letting you create contact groups for that purpose. Aside from a few FireFox related bugs, the sign up went well until I tried to activate my SMS number — it threw up a very scary Application Execution Exception and wouldn’t send a verification code.

Here’s the thing. When I read through the error message I can see they are using ColdFusion. Immediately I am suspecting that this company is not building a scalable SMS service. I might be wrong in that suspicion, after all, I am not a programmer and while I have heard of lots of cool people building large ColdFusion apps out there — I really don’t hear about new and popular web services using this platform these days.

While the Twitters of the world are all playing around with Ruby — are any serious developers still into ColdFusion? Unless they are forced to maintain an old code base, I doubt it. Suspicions aside, I’ll try Moka again in another day or two to see if the exception is fixed.

Testing is not optional — unless your customers are desperate.

Greg — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:10:48 +0000

Why would the brilliant engineers in Cupertino forget to test the iPhone weather application for temperatures below zero? It seems basic, but a lot of important details were missed on the iPhone.

Thorough product testing is considered optional by most Web 2.0 companies and even Gadgets 2.0 product companies (Apple).

So go ahead, slap the words alpha and beta on any product and sell it to the masses. Smart co’s do it strategically though. Launching without testing is a good method of bootstrapping. It works only if you offer something customers really desperately want. Me Too products need testing, True New products can slide if they include something customers are really desperate to use.

If your product is only marginally better than what is out there, but at a better price or slightly improved service model – testing is not optional. The few switchers you can find will tell you the product sucks and move on, leaving a trail of suck tags in your products’ wake.

Apple’s customers complain loudly and so do Google customers, but for this list of good things they do, iPhone and Gmail are enough of a magnitude better that the Outlooks, Hotmails, and Blackberries of the world that loud complaints are ignored.

Anyway, at least I’m not in Boston anymore, so I really don’t need my iPhone weather to go below 0 degrees.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: iphone, testing, gmail, beta, alpha

I’m feeling iPhony

Greg — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:48:55 +0000

When stressed, humans search differently. They type faster and skip steps they might otherwise take in entering terms and refining search strings. The Safari browser on the iPhone has a nifty feature that makes any phone number clickable. So, when searching for a restaurant to make reservations, I can usually click the number in the search results and call the restaurant.

This feature in Safari works well, until I was stressed the other day at the Amtrack train station in High Point. The train arrived late and the person wasn’t waiting there. We had a tight schedule for an important meeting a few towns away, therefore I was frantically searching for the website of the company this person worked for to find her phone number. Instead of waiting for the search results to complete, I held the phone up to my head after clicking search. As if the iPhone could skip a few steps and connect me right through to the phone number in the top search result. So now I’m thinking that in the future, the “I’m feeling lucky” button will actually be a useful feature.

On screen deleting for techies only

Greg — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:25:56 +0000

Gmail is throwing all sorts of great features at users, including AIM chat integration. But from tests I’ve run recently, these delete in the display features are often troubling to regular people. It’s fast and confusing — and even if an undo is present as when deleting or labeling an email, it shouldn’t be the primary means of deleting something. It can be traumatic for someone to accidentally click the (x) and watch their shock as it goes away without a clue as to how to bring it back.

Google map on iPhone is failing to find the way

Greg — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:42:45 +0000

I usually email driving directions to my email address and check the email from my iPhone to find my way while on the road. For some reason, these URLs are not working on Google maps in the iPhone even though they work fine on a regular browser… what gives?

This is an example. I’m sure the wonderkids at Google will figure it out eventually.

Link: http: //maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=223+Hartford+Ave,+Charlotte,+NC+28209,+USA+to+2414+e.+5th+st.,+charlotte,+nc&sll=35.192696,-80.870812&sspn=0.0121,0.020041&ie=UTF8&ll=35.199552,-80.869761&spn=0.048394,0.080166&z=14&om=1

Google map on iPhone is failing to find the way

Greg — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:40:41 +0000

“No search results found” on the iPhone, but it works fine on a PC…

This is an example of an iPhone broken URL from Google.

Driving Directions
Link:

World Usability Day is here!

Greg — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 14:13:32 +0000

Join us at the main Charlotte Public Library today from 12-4 p.m. for World Usability Day activities and fun. For more information about worldwide events, check out the Usability Professionals Association WUD site here

Google Desktop Search Beta review

Greg — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:28:23 +0000

I’ve been trying out Google Desktop Search for three years now. First on Windows, now on a Mac. I use it like most power mac users use Quicksilver — to launch applications and open documents without using the finder. It’s fast, and doesn’t require me to learn how to use it like QS. I just start typing a few letters and usually within seconds it displays the file, email, web site, or application I want to open.

Can Google really get away with calling this a Beta product anymore? Yes, I see plenty of room for improvement. Like the updater. In three years of using and updating GDS, I still get confused every time I see this message:

Uploaded with Skitch!

Oh shit. No wonder I didn’t twitter as much, no one was responding to my messages…

Greg — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 02:47:00 +0000

Uploaded with Skitch!

I always thought responses would appear in the direct messages link, but none ever did. I never even saw this tab after 6 months of twittering and sending direct messages… oops.