Pat’s Point of View

A club sandwich is one my favourite meals. When I go to a cafe or bistro and they have a club sandwich or BLT on the menu I will almost certainly order it; it’s my “usual”. For my wife it’s spaghetti bolognese. All over the world we have partaken in our usual fare and compared the results with all others that have come before. I don’t think this is uncommon, I think most people have at least one usual.

Nor is it surprising that we do the same thing with technology. Most people have their usual methods or key metrics for assessing how well, or how easy, products work. When you open up a new piece of software or a website you’ve not visited before, there are those little tests you perform to get a feel for it, give it a test drive, to get its measure quite quickly.

My wife’s “virtual” spaghetti bolognese for a new PC is opening Microsoft Word and seeing how long it takes to load.

James Robertson, says searching for “leave form” is one of his usuals for an intranet. Almost all intranets have a form or set of instructions for applying to leave, so how well the intranet search guides the user to this content is akin to taking its pulse.

When doing an expert review of a website, I usually start by disabling CSS and Javascript and taking a squiz at the raw underbelly of the site. Not conclusive nor exhaustive but just a habit I’ve gotten into.

These quick methods of assessment are not a replacement for formal QA testing or usability testing, but rather a short-cut that gets right to the heart of the matter and gives you a feel for the qualities of the technology in question.

What are some of your technology “usuals”?

[Photo credit: Puck777 on flickr]

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Ramblings. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment, find out more about me or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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