Al Stevens – Art director, interactive and user experience designer. » Web Design

Affordable user testing just got a lot closer

Al Stevens — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:02:27 +0000

Designed to work on Apple laptops with their built in i-Sight cameras. Silverback is an application designed to bring user testing into the hands of the masses.

Silverback will give even the smallest studio an informed understanding of user experience – .NET magazine

Your camera records the user while their desktop experience is simultaneously captured, along with a visual feedback system which highlights where clicks occur. The two videos are then outputted, picture to picture in quicktime.

At just $49 this will allow even the smallest of studios to gain valuable insight into people’s behaviour whilst using their websites.

.Net magazine scored the beta version at 4/5 which is pretty good for a product which costs all of £25.

For me the only drawback is that you I just have to shell out £699 to buy myself a mac to get it working on. Maybe they will create a Windows version too at some point.

So what are you waiting for?

Grab some people of the street, give it to your mum or dad, or maybe actually pay the right demographic of people to participate in a common transaction and you could have some invaluable insights into how they interact with your website, and where their difficulties lie in achieving their goals.

Speculation on the future

I was thinking how great it would be to have an app like this online, so that you could get users the world over to do your testing for you. I know Flash can (with permission) take images from a persons webcam and microphone – I wonder how far away we are from a solution like that

Silverback is available from tomorrow and was developed by the lovely people at ClearLeft and I would liem to personally thank them for making it so affordable and therefore accessible.

Power to the people!

http://www.silverbackapp.com/

The simple ones are always the best – Where the hell is Matt

Al Stevens — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 19:35:17 +0000

A glorious few minutes of video highlighting the fact that the simple ideas are always the best. Well done Matt!

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

From Fubiz

Wales in Style wins Travolution award

Al Stevens — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:48:52 +0000

I am delighted by the news that the Wales in Style website has won an award at the Travolution 2007 awards ceremony.

Wales in Style provides the discerning visitor with the very best of Welsh tourism. It’s a by-invitation-only online community centred on a Website seed-funded originally by the Welsh Assembly, now run as partnership subscription model operated by Designate on behalf of the Welsh Assembly Government.

The award recognises creativity, user-friendliness, conversion levels, and effectiveness to increase traffic and boost sales.

I was involved heavily with the project, converting initial concept work into final designs, working on the IA closely with one of our producers, performing some ad-hoc user testing, and finally building the detailed html templates.

We endeavoured to make the website fully accessible and we’re delighted with the outcome of both a great looking website based on well formed and semantic html.

Designate won the award Best Agency for Website Design in the category Marketing and Innovation awards.

http://www.walesinstyle.com