At the beginning of the month, I started usability testing for FromThePage. Due to my limited resources, I'm not able to perform usability testing in control rooms, or (better yet) hire a disinterested expert with a background in the natural sciences to conduct usability tests for me. I'm pretty much limited to sending people the URL for the app with a pleading e-mail, then … [Read more...] about Rails: Logging User Activity for Usability
Archives for March 2008
THATCamp 2008
I'm going to THATCamp at the end of May to talk about From The Page and a few dozen other cool projects that are going on in the digital humanities. If anybody can offer advice on what to expect from an "unconference", I'd sure appreciate it. This may be the thing that finally drives me to use Twitter. … [Read more...] about THATCamp 2008
Rails 2.0 Gotchas
The deprecation tools for Rails 2.0 are grand, but they really don't tell you everything you need to know. The things that have bitten me so far are: The built-in pagination has been removed from the core framework. Unlike tools like acts_as_list and acts_as_tree, however, there's no obvious plugin that makes the old code work. This is because the old pagination code was … [Read more...] about Rails 2.0 Gotchas
Collaborative Transcription as Crowdsourcing
Yesterday morning I saw Derek Powazek present on crowdsourcing -- user-generated content and collaborative communities. While he covered a lot of material that (users will do unexpected things, don't exploit people, design for the "selfish user"), there was one anecdote I thought especially relevant for FromThePage. A publishing house had polled a targeted group of people to … [Read more...] about Collaborative Transcription as Crowdsourcing
Meet me at SXSWi 2008
I'll be at South by Southwest Interactive this weekend. If any of my readers are also attending, please drop me a message or leave a comment. I'd love to meet up. … [Read more...] about Meet me at SXSWi 2008