iJoomla Ad Agency is always a work in progress and even though we try hard to make it user-friendly, we have received reports that some advertisers have found the front-end confusing. So we decided to do usability testing. As always, it was a very eye-opening experience — even a mortifying one. When you’re doing Web [...]

Giles Fabris of DiehardCustomers.com is a good friend, a business coach and a customer service guru. He’s also a new Joomla 1.5 user who has been working with the CMS for the past three months. He is a typical Joomla end-user: a business owner, not a developer. I had just one task for him: to [...]

A few weeks ago, I explained why the new Facebook profile doesn’t work. One of the main issues was the photos that show at the top of the profile seem totally random and are very distracting. A friend pointed that hovering over the pictures pulls up a “close” button that lets you replace the photo [...]

Continuing our discussions about companies that seem to be run by monkeys is… Facebook. It’s not that I doubt Mark Zuckerberg’s genius or that Facebook revolutionized the way we connect with friends and family, but some of their user experience decisions really make me wonder. If I had to describe them in one word, it [...]

Joomla.org has a great magazine. Its editor, Paul Orwig, recently asked me to perform a usability test to find out whether it was suffering from any problems. Paul identified three tasks: How do I register as an author, and is it clear that community members are invited to become contributing authors? How do I contribute [...]

While I was at Joomla Day West, I took Joe Leblanc’s suggestion and conducted a usability test on Joomla 1.6 nested categories and ACL. The tester was Brad, a web designer who uses Joomla but has never used Joomla 1.6 — perfect for our needs! Joomla 1.6 Nested Categories and ACL Usability Testing Video Brad’s [...]

Drupal is doing it, WordPress is doing it, Amazon has been doing it for years, and now Joomla is doing it. They’re all doing Usability Testing — and no wonder. Usability Testing is probably the most underrated and overlooked method for improving the user experience of a site. It’s also the most powerful and the [...]

Joomla Day West was a huge success! Almost all the Joomla team members came and it was great to meet some of them for the first time. I also had the chance to chat with some of iJoomla’s customers which is always fun. The event started on Friday night with an Oktoberfest party, which included [...]

Sometimes I do wonder if some companies are run by monkeys. Take CA ( ca.com), for example. I won’t go into why their products are some of the worse I’ve ever used, why their customer support is beyond a joke, how their anti-virus messed up my computer for months, and why they acquired a great [...]

If you happened to upgrade your Firefox recently, and you’ve been using the Web Developer Toolbar, you’ll have had a nasty surprise. The toolbar didn’t make it through the upgrade. That’s really bad news. For developers like me, the toolbar has been a huge timesaver. This is what it does: Reveals the CSS of any [...]