Copyright (c) 2010 Andrew Peterson. All Rights Reserved.
The UX/Spoke tool is designed to help you explore many of the different usability tools out there. It is designed to force you to approach it in a certain way-- what questions am I asking now-- and spur you to consider other tools that you may not be using.
This product was provoked by working with people and teams that found one tool and hammered it to death--
- "How do we add metrics to this?",
- "What do our metrics tell us to do next?"
- "Let's do usability testing every week."
- "Let's make sure we're talking to our users every week."
Although none of those are necessarily bad ideas, it's worth stepping back to get the big picture.
Go to http://uxspoke.com to check it out.
It's all Javascript, using Canvas for the wheel. I'm not sure I meant to make a lotto wheel, but I stumbled across one, thought it would be fun to build (but probably not usable)... and here we are. I think there are probably other interfaces that would be more intuitive, but what the heck-- is it usable enough?
I use Csster (http://github.com/ndp/csster) and jQuery (http://jQuery.com). I don't use jQueryUI (except for a single easing function, which-- to be honest-- would be good to factor away).
I also used this as a playground to learn about:
- more canvas functionality and animations
- trig
- easing in jQuery (and in animations in general)
- HTML5 fonts
- color calculations and developing a "color factory" Javascript helper.
- different Ux tools (duh)
I use my side project to pursue research and educational interests:
Micro-apps: This project fits into my investigation into "micro-apps" What can I build in just a few hours that is useful in its own right? I used to have 24 minute BART ride and challenge myself to find "bite size" pieces of code to exactly fit the window.
Randomness in UIs: where can randomness be incorporated into UIs and add value? In UX/Spoke, questions are distributed randomly on the wheel on each page load, and it is spun to reveal a different question. Many earlier iterations involved randomizing colors as well, but this proved too much-- at least for me with my rusty visual design chops.
Visual Design: I'm also working on being a better visual designer.
Comments, thoughts always welcome, Andy