@media Day 2 - Afternoon

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.

I really like Andy Budd – every time I come to @media he recognises me and says hi. He’s a guy who knows his stuff, but he takes time out for those around him, and he deserves your attention.

The last session before the Hot Topics panel was Robin Christopherson from AbilityNet. Every time I attend a session with Robin I learn as much from watching and listening to him present (in terms of how he does it) as I do from the content of his session. Robin is blind, and when things don’t go quite as expected on screen, he doesn’t always know. That gives a helpful insight for an able person as to the problems that impaired users might have. I now need to go to Opera Labs to investigate FingerTouch, which looks like a great improvement for my mobile browser of choice. It was also great to see examples of ARIA being used which was pretty inspiring.