Grasslands

Word of mouth marketing is key to your business' success, which is why you will want to attend an event to learn all about it from the experts. Bonus: You can go at a great discounted price! Here's an excerpt from Jonathan Kay's post:

So what’s the point? The point is that Word of Mouth will be crucial to the success of your start up (And remember it’s FREE marketing). As you may know, Grasshopper Group’s mission is to create products and services that are necessary to your success as entrepreneurs. This is exactly why we have done two things to help you become a WOM rock star

Read the entire post over at Grasshopper Group

I was brought into Grasshopper as a user experience designer about three months ago and have been serving as the lead designer for the new interface we are working on. During this recent redesign phase, we've been doing a lot of usability testing and today I will be sharing ideas on it.

To start off, we need a definition for usability testing and I couldn't find one clear cut definition for 'usability testing' but through utilizing Google search, I was able to compile the following:

Usability testing is defined as:

Usability testing is a technique used to evaluate a design involving use of a prototype or product by its intended users, testing to determine the extent to which the design is understood, easy to learn, easy to operate and attractive to its users. In a collaborative usability test the usability specialist moderates an active dialog with the participant in order to better understand his/her behaviors and opinions.

Now as we have a basic understanding of what usability testing is we can speak about reasons why it is important and the benefits of

Good programmers are always in search of tools to make them even more productive. Be it those text processors, application launchers, IDEs, we are never a hundred percent satisfied with our toolbox. Maybe this is an extension of our day-to-day behavior, one of constantly looking to improve the execution of a task or simpler – not to say minimalist – manners to solve a problem.

Besides that, another similar problem is faced by members of our class: the neverending search for time, focus or task management methodologies. It was during one of those searches that I found a tool that soon became one of my favorites: the Pomodoro Technique.

Created by Italian Francesco Cirillo in the late eighties, the Pomodoro Technique is a very simple time management methodology. You work within short time periods of 25 minutes by using a timer. During those periods, you should focus exclusively on a single task, doing your best to ignore interruptions.

Each 25-minute work cycle is called a pomodoro (Italian for tomato) and is followed by a short pause, three to five minutes long.

The idea behind this method is the