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Video of Paper Prototype Usability Tests for a Web Site Publishing Tool
Posted by TimSlavin at April 17, 2008
"Here's an interesting video showing how a paper prototype usability test helped the usability team at Corel find flaws in a preliminary design of a website creation product."
From GUUUI.
While I'm a sucker for live and video tape of usability testing, this one may be self-indulgent given my work creating Red Wrangler. Corel seems locked in the classic paradigms of client side software. And ways of thinking about web page and web site publishing. These paradigms don't work, unfortunately.
One solution is what we've done with Red Wrangler, breaking out the web site publishing problems into three parts: content, templates, and navigation links. The latter is sometimes dynamic, sometimes hard-coded in the templates. Typically templates are created by people who know HTML and CSS and we provide support to make it all work easily. Non-technical people typically work only with content using the WYSIWYG editor. When you do create a page, you link to that page either by updating the navigation links and/or linking from other pages. It's not a perfect solution but it avoids the confusion you see in this video.
The only solution I've seen work that is similar to Corel's is Google's publishing product. You can drag and drop pages and the functionality is fairly intuitive. I believe, for example, that Google's product updates any navigation links dynamically based on how you order pages.
However, like Corel, Google's product thinks of web site and web page publishing as a silo. In fact, publishing web sites is part of a larger process. Red Wrangler is unique, so far, because we make it easy to corral in one place all the other related internet marketing activities that go with publishing a web site or a web page. For example, most business sites have a Contact Us page that generates leads and those leads must be gathered for follow-up and marketing with direct mail and email.
In any event, if you're interested in watching paper prototyping, this is an interesting video.
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Red Wrangler is used to publish and manage these websites: The Fine Art of Family, Magnets in Motion, Organic Excellence, Becker + Becker, The Wauregan, MRK Photo, GetTished.com, and Maximum Living, among other websites.
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