I've been looking through this blog in preparation for handing it in tomorrow. It's really interesting to look back at what we've done, and what my thoughts have been along the way. I feel like I've done a huge amount of background reading, although some of this has been driven by the work project as well as the course, and it's been fantastic the way the two have fed into each other.

I really feel that I have a much better handle on the process of conducting user research now. Which is obviously good, because i'm going to need it to plan what we do for the next 4 months at work! But it's good to feel that some of the frustrations I felt in my last job (where I could see that the software we were producing was wrong and ugly, but had no framework or language to say why or what we should be producing) are going away. I think I have gained an important toolset, and look forward to being able to practice using it.

We presented our report today. Done!

Quite a stressful day. Although we met last Thursday to combine everything and get the presentation structure sorted, we still had to make sure we were going to be within the 10 minute time limit. We also had to get everything printed out and bound.

Getting within the 10 minutes was tough. We felt we'd got the structure right, with a brief overview of our demographic and the techniques we used, then spending most of our time on our findings and recommendations. And we did cut it down to 10 minutes, although perhaps we rushed it a bit to try and fit everything in. It got a bit stressful cutting it down too - we're all so tired that it was difficult keeping tempers and doing it again and again and again, and it was really hard to make suggestions that didn't come out as criticisms of the points.

Watching the people we were presenting to and listening to the other presentations, I'm pretty sure our balance was right. The clients were more interested in the recommendations than the methods etc. I think we should have made more positive points about the webpage to make it more agreeable, but our 10 minute limit meant we'd have had to have sacrificed something else, which would have been tricky. It was very frustrating to hear most of the other groups going well over 10 minutes, given how hard we'd chopped at ours to get within it.

Definitely a relief to have it done though...

I was looking for a standard report format, and guess what? This year ISO have produced a standard for a Common Industry Format (CIF). There's a good site linked to from usability.gov (of course... ) from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology - http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/iusr/ and ISO have approved it as standard 25062:2006.

This is really good for work. The only catch is that it is aimed at summative testing, rather than formative. So we're going to need to define metrics for testing. That's actually a good plan, as it'll give us a good, repeatable way to compare the proposed design to the current. Nice for feeding back to the stripes, and gives it all a more... ummm... scientific feel (for want of a better phrase!).

It'll be good to be able to tell them we're adhering to ISO standards too. Lends the process more credibility and should give us more ammo against the resistance to change!

Part of our preparation for the next seminar is to research the Usability Standards. Useful for work too.

Although this is still a relatively young area, ISO have started producing standards. There's the 13407:1999, which is a standard for the process of User-Centred Design, and looks really handy for our work project. It follows an iterative structure, and I think we've got most of it covered in our plans as it stands. I might see if we can get a copy at work. Then there's loads of sections of ISO 9241 that apply.

In the meantime, Usability Partners (http://www.usabilitypartners.se/usability/standards.shtml) have a pretty good brief overview of the relevant standards, and related ones for further info. There's a much more detailed view on usabilitynet.org (http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/r_international.htm), once you've got a feel for what you need to find out.

Standards are obviously really handy for allowing people to know what they are going to get from a usability review. It also allows an identification of 'best practice' and provides some kind of framework.

I still need to find some kind of report format though.

Well, it took me a while, but I finally managed to get hold of a librarian to talk to! People aren't kidding when they say stakeholders can be hard to pin down. Only managed over the phone, but better than nothing.

It was a bit of a rushed interview - she had to run off to open the library - but I did get some interesting info. It definitely backed up our findings through other methods, in that a lot of the things we are suggesting were things that she had on her wish list. Nice to get some validation on those, to know we aren't coming in from a totally unexpected angle perhaps.

The interview was tricky. I had a list of prepared questions, but due to how short the interview was I had to prune them a lot to get the most relevant information. I think that's a really important thing to remember in future. I'd written them down by area of information, and it would have made it easier to reorder in list of importance. Plus guiding the conversation without trying to be too leading was really hard! It would have been nice to do it face to face, but working in Burgess Hill makes it that much harder to say pop over in a lunch hour to talk.

I can see it's a very useful thing to do, but I can also see how it can get squeezed out of the process! I mean, it would have been good to maybe get some feedback from some of the other libraries too, from the homework clubs maybe, but there just aren't enough hours at the moment!