I hadn’t really thought about it before, but Andy Budd has a very similar presentation style to my own. He’s incredibly enthusiastic and passionate about what he’s speaking about, and he wanders around waving his arms in an extremely animated way. Snap!
The topic of usability testing is an important one. I always try to impress upon our clients the need to see how the systems we build for them are used and tweak and fix accordingly. Andy’s approach to low-budget, formative testing to identify and solve usability issues during development as part of an agile approach struck a chord with me. I think that it’s important to have a dialog with ‘average’ users (i.e. not involved directly with development and therefore too close to a project to notice the problems) and to feed back into the development process what you find and the pain points you identify. Far better to find and fix during development than to force your product to fail testing or, even worse, to hit issues during rollout that hinder adoption.
