brianstill.com Blog

What started as a research project, born from necessity, in early 2010 has now become EyeGuide, the most affordable eye tracker on the market today. We needed an eye tracker in our Tech usability research lab but couldn’t afford any of the expensive offerings. Open source alternatives just weren’t viable. So we began to build our own.

We tested it, employing actual users to give us feedback, then integrating that feedback over and over into product improvements. At some point in late 2010 we realized we had not just an effective eye tracker for us, but others too, with the same need and financial limitations, also could use it. We licensed the technology through Texas Texas, began a startup company, Grinbath LLC, and began work on manufacturing, marketing, and distributing EyeGuide.

EyeGuide is being sold now worldwide. It is highly effective, and at under $1,500 the best deal on the market. You can go to www.grinbath.com to find out more about it. We’re also doing some other cool stuff that will lead to more product releases in 2012. Necessity really is the mother of invention.

Traditional approaches to usability testing focus on evaluating a product toward the end of development, often too late to improve the product. Iterative testing, on the other hand, starts early and continues throughout development. Beginning when the product is little more than a series of paper sketches, iterative testing enables developers to employ user feedback to incrementally change product design.

Iterative testing is especially important for complex products like web-enabled phones and other ubiquitous digital technologies. These technologies overload users and add to the complexity of their environments. My webinar talk for STC Chicago on December 7, 2010 presents a collection of real-world case studies to examine the role of iterative testing for improving the usability of complex products.

In my column, “Trends in Usability,” in the July/August 2010 issue of STC’s Intercom, I write that “Without a doubt, mobile or portable computing has dramatically affected us, and is still affecting us. As technical communicators, we must be aware not just of the ever-growing assortment of devices for accessing information, but we must also understand and design for the experiences of users who are working, learning, and living in a ubiquitous computing world.” Even though our mobile phones are better, with even richer apps, they’re not more usable because of what we want to do with them, how we want to do it, and where (or what else we’re doing) we’re using them.

Why do enterprise systems have complicated search pages, when Google has a single search box that works better? Why struggle with an expense reimbursement system that is not as easy as home accounting software? Although this seems like comparing apples to oranges, as information and communication technologies reach into every industry, the demand for easy-to-use work tools continues to grow. An exploration of cutting-edge approaches for evaluating the usability of complex user interaction, Usability of Complex Information Systems: Evaluation of User Interaction focuses on improving design and communicating content to the end user. Mike Albers (East Carolina) and I are editors. It’s available in September from Taylor and Francis’ CRC Press.

2008 marked the 10-year Anniversary of the Open Source movement, which has had a substantial impact on not only software production and adoption, but also on the sharing and distribution of information. Technical communication as a discipline has taken some advantage of the movement or its derivative software, but this article argues not as much as it could or should. We have adopted Open Source Software (OSS) to manage courses or websites; we have, following the principles of Open Source, made some intellectual resources available; but we have not developed a truly open—open to access, open to use, and open to edit—pedagogical resource that teachers of technical and professional communication courses at every level can rely on to craft free offerings to their students. Now is the ideal time to consider developing OpenTechComm. My new article in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (April, 2010) makes the case for why and how it could be implemented.