Mr. Daniel Romano’s Weblog

I had a chance to hear an NPR report on Friday about Paul Potts on the British reality TV show Britain’s Got Talent. Honestly, he puts us to shame. It begs the question: what does America need more? An effeminate South Asian or a tubby Brit cellphone salesman who can make women cry with the sound of his voice? Um, really? I listened to his rendition of Nessun Dorma and even I considered sleeping with him, of course in a totally non-gay way.

I love David Cross. I love him as a never-nude. I love him on Law and Order. I just love him. I love his response to Ron Paul and Rudy G.

Today I had what I might consider to be the best fish tacos I have ever had. My In-Laws are in town so my wife dug up Tacos Baja Ensenada in Johnathan’s Gold’s Counter Intelligence. Hands down, best fish tacos outside of Mexico. I highly recommend it.

After tacos we visited a large ethnic Mexican grocery store and hooked up some great produce on the cheap: avocados, chilies, limes, and Mexican mangos.

I know it is totally lame that I’m actually writing about how I bough produce in East Los Angles, but I don’t care. I’m a blogger, and I’m going to tell you about the most mundane details of my day, for all 4 of you.

I’m pretty sure if the tables were turned, the cat would basically respond by asking you if you thought it was stupid and perhaps later it would crap in your shoes for being an insolent fool.

TYDTWD, or “ Take Your Dog to Work Day” for the layperson, is June 22. Talk to your HR department, your building managers, whoever. Our dogs spend all day by themselves, give them the opportunity to see where you sleep all day.

We successfully rescued Tulip from the South LA Shelter and she is now safe and sound at Best Friends Animal Hospital. In a few days she will be moved to Linda Blair’s dog rescue sanctuary in Acton, CA. She will remain there until she finds a good home.

So as a follow up to Usability Testing with Morae. We a very simple small test of around 5 tasks with 2 respondents (interns actually). Keep in mind this is the first time I have ever moderated a usability session (I’m usually in the other room), so I didn’t really get a sense of how the Observer worked, but my research partner was very happy with it.

Creating the study, outlining the tasks, and putting together a follow-up survey was very very easy. The only problem was I kept going of script — perhaps evidence of my lack of moderators experience — but my observers was able to keep up.

Importing the data was a breeze. We are running the Observer and the Manager on the same box. Two clicks and we had all the data from the sessions, graphs, charts, even power point presentations if we needed them. Very very happy with the Morae suite.

Now about moderating. I learned a ton from the discussions with my test respondents, so now i’m all lovin’ on the qualitative data. I realized I am a people person, i can be nice, and i’m not super sensative when they can’t figure out what I built — granted I just did a session with a few of our interns and I bet they thought I could fire them or something.

So basically, if you have a small budget and want to do some usability testing I highly recommend Morae. Oh and order yourself a copy of Steven Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think.

And I just wanted to give a shout out to Betsy Weber, keep evangelizing that good software, and can I get discounts on few more copies of the Observer?

Just cracked open Morae today at work, and I have to say, it is pretty rad. It doesn’t beat hiring a moderator and testing in an actual facility, but for those with a tight budget it will do the trick. Still working out the issues with creating tasks and such, but I was able to quickly setup a test plan. Tomorrow I’m going to turn the interns into lab rats and see what this software can really do.

Tulip is a 9 month old sweet and super cute dog who is currently at the South LA Animal shelter. She is Red-lined, which means she is due to euthanized at any moment. If you don’t adopt her then her death will forever be a pox upon your soul, do your duty as human and spare this awefully cute dog.

South LA City Shelter, 3612 11th Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90018