The key to a successful new product
is engaging with the right audience.
Audience engagement comes naturally when a product is easy and seamless to use. To ensure success products should be tested before development, at the prototyping stage. This practice prevents significant costs incurred by user journey fixes, interaction design modifications, and interface changes to a product that is in development or already developed.
Usability testing is at the heart of user-centric interaction design, guaranteeing that the final product will satisfy its target audience. It tells you whether your product is intuitive, user-friendly and functional, and can even provide new perspectives that profoundly impact the very essence of your product. This upstream functional validation accelerates Time to Market by averting waste on unnecessary features, correcting any flaws in essential features before implementation (thus eliminating the need to redevelop later), and focusing development time on features proven critical to the application’s success.
The test phase consists of observing how real users use the system under controlled conditions. When test users encounter problems on the path towards their objective, or have questions, the prototype is adjusted to address the issue, and then re-tested. Various tools can be used to build the prototype (software or paper) and to collect information on its use (surveys, interviews, video captures, eye-tracking, etc.). These tools can be complemented by qualitative tests to gain a better understanding of the motivations, feelings, and perceptions of users beyond their actions.
A usability testing phase is a smart investment for anyone who wants to reduce risk, finish a development project on time and on budget, and come away with a final product that fully meets you and your users’ expectations. Spiria’s dedicated experts can help you develop and implement the best testing strategy to achieve your business goals.
Tutorial: Dynamic search with htmx, hyperscript and ProcessWire
Using ProcessWire, you can easily create a dynamic search with very little code. This search can’t compete with engines such as Elasticsearch or Solr, of course. However, it is suitable for most “showcase” sites. Here’s how we did it on Spiria’s site using the htmx small library and its companion hyperscript.
In honor of International Women’s Day, we gathered women employees at Spiria for a virtual round table to hear them talk about women in the field of digital technology, on how far we have come, what remains to be done, and what inspires them on any given day.
Docker as an outstanding learning and evaluation environment
Docker makes for a great learning environment. Its disruptive impact on other technologies became clear to me as soon as I set to learning it. Docker puts these tools within easy reach so that, given a decent grasp of the Docker ecosystem (Docker Hub, CLI, Dockerfile, Compose files), a world of mainly open-source IT opens up for anyone wanting to try it out, to learn and to evaluate it. Stress testing is safe because the container’s sandbox environment prevents any harm to the host system. If you break it, just delete the container and start over!