Usability in Civic Life is run by volunteers – usability super heroes – working on short and long-term projects to bring usability and a better experience to the human and technological systems that make up our civic environment.
You’ll find links to current projects under the heading “Active Now” (on the right side of the page for visual readers.) These include our own projects, and ones that we think are worth supporting.
- Be a superhero (sign up to help with flash usability tests)
- Be ethical (read the guidelines)
- Speak up (how to contact your representatives)
- Get in touch (we’d love to hear from you)
How do we work?
Project often come up quickly, and need answers equally quickly. To meet this need we’ve created the flash usability test.
A flash usability test takes careful planning, but the sessions can be run with little or no special equipment. We recruit volunteers for each event who can run the tests, or help with recruiting participants, managing the materials, or taking notes.
We try to have several different teams working simultaneously, so that we can run more sessions, cover different geographical areas, and collect enough data to provide strong results. Past projects have worked with as few as 12 people, and as many as 100.
Dana Chisnell wrote about how this works in Wilder than testing in the wild: usability testing by flash mob