Comments on: Learnability, affordance, and rejected systems.

By: Darren McMillan

Darren McMillan — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:28:34 +0000

Fair point, and for Jing that was certainly an issue in our last workplace. Not so much a restriction in accessing certain internet services, but more so in the data ownership of remotely stored content. After making sure ScreenCast (a remote data hosting service for Jing) didn’t retain ownership of any data we would upload, we’d use a password protection feature for our pictures / videos to make sure our data wasn’t viewable by the public.

I guess from a learnability viewpoint this was a notable issue with Jing, as password protecting content on ScreenCast wasn’t immediately apparent. I remember it took a bit of digging about to work out how we could do it. Hopefully it is much easier to use now, but I wouldn’t know as I no longer use the ScreenCast side of Jing.

I guess this goes back to the critical path viewpoint. Ensuring that your products critical path provides a fantastic experience, will cover the vast majority of your users needs. High investment here usually pays off. The non critical path features will often get less attention though, which can lead to even the best products having niggles.

By: Del Dewar

Del Dewar — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 09:09:34 +0000

True enough, Darren but some company environments are a bit more restricted than others. Proxy access for instance at our place, prevents us from using simple things like Google Docs and there’s alsways the issue of having proprietary information of any sort on a public platform.

Still, swings and roundabouts, eh?

By: Darren McMillan

Darren McMillan — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 07:53:59 +0000

Hey Del,

I messed about with Session Tester ( http://sessiontester.openqa.org/ ) for a while when doing session based testing, then I had a play with Rapid Reporter as well.

In the end though I found myself using windows notepad, and anything unresolved from my notes either went straight into my todo list as a task, or a mindmap for visual feedback.

I find google docs is good as well for taking session notes, as you can share your document prior to the session starting with others, such as other testers, or a developers code that you’re testing. That way when you go to discuss something from your notes, and if you’ve added a screenshot or a stack trace with it, you can easily ask them to open the document you shared, while discussing it.

Thanks,

Darren.