Navigation for Wise Scout - A blog about our online adventures while creating our job board - July, 2007

Our first user was not an internet novice by any means but not a regular user of job sites. After a bit of discussion around the user putting themselves in the shoes of a contractor, understanding the general mindset of how we find work and what we are looking for from a job site. I set out a few tasks that I would like them to achieve. I set them up with a laptop, webcam and Camtasia running (with audio to allow them to comment on parts that were confusing). Pressed record and left them to it. After about 20 mins they had tried pretty much all features of the site. Then I watched the video back which proved to be by far the best test yet, lots of really small details that in hindsight were just plain confusing to the user, some pages that desperately needed additional text to explain what was going on and some combinations of button and key presses we had never tried resulting in some lovely yellow screens.

Why we built the recruiter job posting features straight away I will never know (actually that was my fault). It just wasn't needed to launch the site. I need lots of contractors to use the site to be able to attract recruiters to spend their time putting jobs on the site. We should have saved this part of the development and pushed the site live sooner. I hope this isnt a decision we live to regret? We are going to finish them off anyway for now but I bet they don't get used for a while.

So a tip for anyone else, concentrate on the absolute minimum you can get away with delivering, get it live and then carry on.

Crikey, what a weekend, I must have spent about 20 hrs this weekend testing. Have raised over 200 bugs/changes from full blown YSOD (yellow screen of death) to simple text changes.