Interesting Usertest and Incoming

I ran across a neat website the other day for getting actual user feedback when viewing your website: UserTesting. They have a free option called peek that records a short (~5 min.) screencast of a user visiting the site and narrating their impressions.

You can imagine this to be quite interesting to someone building a site.

It appears the service asks its testers to answer three specific questions (I am assuming this is for the free service mainly):

• What is your first impression of this web page? What is this page for?
• What is the first thing you would like to do on this page? Please go ahead and try to do that now. Please describe your experience.
• What stood out to you on this website? What, if anything, frustrated you about this site? Please summarize your thoughts regarding this website.

Here’s the actual video they sent me (can also be found on their website):

I don’t have much to say about the testing. It was very insightful and helpful to hear someones view coming to the site fresh. I’m glad that my focus on simplicity is appreciated!

It was interesting that the navigation drawer wasn’t used, or found, until the very end of the session. It was also interesting to hear the testers thoughts around scrolling down the main page (is it so rare these days for content to be longer than a single screen - above the fold?).

Exposure Blended Panorama Coming Soon

The creator of new processing project PhotoFlow, Andrea Ferrero, is being kind enough to take a break from coding to write a new tutorial for us: “Exposure Blended Panoramas with Hugin and Photoflow”!

I’ve been collaborating with him on getting things in order to publish and this looks like it’s going to be a fun tutorial!

Submitting

We’ve been talking back and forth trying to find a good workflow for contributors to be able to provide submissions as easily as possible. At the moment I translate any submissions into Markdown/HTML as needed from whatever source the author decides to throw at me. This is less than ideal (but at least it’s nice and easy for authors - which is more important to me than having to port them manually).

Github Submissions

For those comfortable with Git and Github I have created a neat option to submit posts. You can fork my PIXLS.US repository from here:

https://github.com/patdavid/PIXLSUS

Just follow the instructions on that page, and issue a pull request when you’re done. Simple! :) You may want to communicate with me to let me know the status of the submission, in case you’re still working on it, or it’s ready to be published.

Any Old Files

Of course, if you want to submit some content, please don’t feel you have to use Github if you’re not comfortable with it. Feel free to write it any way that works best for you (as I said, my native build files are usually simple Markdown). You can also reach out to me and let me know what you may be thinking ahead of time, as I might be able to help out.