Usability testing in Second Life

Since September of last year I enrolled into a post-academic course on Usability Design. And ever since I am paying close attention at the everyday things that I come across during the day: wrongly placed light switches, doors that don't behave as expected, road signs that get confusing, etc. Actually it is very interesting when you are developing products or applications. Now I am not going to play the advocate on why you should do usability design when creating or enhancing products or applications, but once in a while you will definitly see something popping up on my blog about usability, be it user centered design, participatory design, co-creation, interaction design... .

Today I found something interesting on the blog of Adaptive path. These guys where asked by the makers of Second Life, Linden Labs, to make the world more usable for their users. So normaly when you start with usability to find out who your users are and you will try to sit next to them while they perform their tasks in order to learn how they do things and to figure out what they find hard to and how they go round difficult tasks etc. Now the guys from Adaptive Path are not going to really sit next to the user and observe them, the regular way, but they created an avatar that will go around in this world and they will do their usability research from in there, WOW!

If you want to follow their research, subscribe to their blog!

Vista anybody?

Well I have been very excited about the release of Windows Vista. But as like the rest of us I didn't buy it. Why? Although I am very excited about it, I don't have the money to invest in it. To be able to use Vista I will have to buy a new PC.

Currently I have two laptops which are not capable of running Vista, at least not with the features I would buy Vista for. And I think that this is currently the problem with Vista. A lot of people have to upgrade their current machines to be able to run Vista with all the wistles and bells. Although Microsoft claims that Vista can run on current PCs, yeah true but if you cannot use Aero for instance (and also other features) you will stick with XP until the moment you really have to upgrade.

At least I will!

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