road to understanding
Hey Floozykins, whats happening? Today is my last day of late night testing here at the balloon works, 3 more kids are gonna tell me whats cool about reading. Fun project so far, and my second moderation gig. I had a crazy ADD kid who was swinging his yo-yo all over the room and dancing in his chair and goin pretty crazy and still managed to get some good info outa of him on changes to this program we are testing for a client.
The whole name of the game is rapport. Luckily I have the gift of rapport, a few smiles, a joke and jab and I’m in, now that i’m there, lets talk turkey and fix this beast. I enjoyed this project alot for a number of reasons. First it was my first real structured hours project, you have x hrs and thats it. At first that seems like woah, i cant do it, i need more hrs, but when you really track hrs you can do it. Its like getting retaught on how to spend your time better. I liked that. Mainly cause after you work yer x hrs, you leave, period, no questions asked. When you dont structure yer hrs ya tend to gloss over and work on and on. Structure is good.
Second thing I did on this project was inject some dan-ness into the script. We went out of the typical research realm of questions and added some spunk. These are grade school kids and a few highschool ones, lets kick it up and try and talk in their langauge, and if anything they may tell us thats cool or tell us, dont do that. Sure enough they did, most of them are fairly in sync with where i was going with my questions and its an amazing feeling to have when a grade school kid starts to get “usability” of a program, when they start pointing out what doesnt make sense and why it should more more intuitively, that is a great feeling. Its like you can sense all the gears clickin inside the child and now he/she isnt so quiet.. they wanna know why x didnt do z, and wait a sec I want this here cause.. well.. wait, i learned that there, and then this told me that. Its a rare event in testing when a paricpant really clicks on everything but when they do its really rewarding.
Another aspect of dan-ness i threw into the testing script was a metaphorical “what if” type of question. Typically we do bits of qualitative and quanitative type questions, all too often we get wraped up in what creates the best visually consuming easy to understand results, ie: ratings. You can scale them, graph them, see them over time, its good data but hard to get out of a sugar’d up wired kid who cant sit still for 10 minutes. To me thats a big ass cue for something different. Lets get this kid to think about it differently. Instead of rating, tell me what x is in the sense of a car, a type of person, a store, a place, an experience. The data I get out of that serves for big points I need to present, first, its good data, cause it gets them to align the x with something else, cant understand x, well x is alot like an old beat up honda. Oooo thats interesting why? It gets me to the why and now we can have the conversation about that beat up honda and why that is alot like x, get them talking. Play. Lets play. This also serves are compelling presentation data or report data. Now yer data isnt so lame, its not, x = y + z, your product is a beat up dead honda, woah, now were turnin heads, suddenly yer average data point of “4 out of 6” is saying you suck in a way you can really grasp. Now yer at the front door and you wanna know more.
Anyways its been a fun project…..
Believe it or not, I’m going to attempt to take vacation. Yes that’s right, vacation. A bit of nostaligic notions have been nippin at my feet lately, so I’ve booked a room at the boardwalk in Ocean City, NJ. Why that place? Well for about 23 years growin up every summer, my folks took me to beach every frickin year. It was a great trip, I miss it. I need to hear those waves, i need to see if Dots is still open, or that bike store, or the Aquaport, is it still there. Who knows, I dunno, just goin. Driving across this great land of ours, stayin a few nights in Hershey PA to boot, thats a fun to place as well. Hang with the amish, discover the origins of heathbar goodness and what not.
What else is happening? Hmmmm Gator Dave’s Safari Sitters is heatin up, tales of visiting schools I hear. Very good stuff. Now we probably need to look into making another DVD.
And.. what else. Not much else happening. Gotta get prepped for tonight so signing off! Cya.