Bringing in real people today to look at some new ideas at work. This is labeled ‘user testing’ — but it really means ‘assumption testing.’ Various ideas and strongly-held beliefs make their way into concrete form (in this case, web pages) based on gut instinct, log files, and compromises between internal consistuents. Now we really see what people think. I hope the folks coming in today are talkative: we should pay them by the word, because the more they explain the why behind their actions, the more we’ll learn. I’d love to do testing based on what’s been live for 2+ years almost as much as the prototype we’re showing today, but that will have to wait.
This small, new site has more machine ‘readers’ than humans. And I know how much trouble we go to at work to screen out the machines. What I haven’t done at work, because the scale is impossible, is look at the log files directly, as Tim Bray suggests. The log files are raw, unfiltered, and probably confirm that even in an active, information-seeking world — we’re all using tools to help bring us that information.