Interested in helping us usability test our sites?

In order for websites to remain relevant and useful, we believe it's important to usability test them on a regular basis. We don't only recommend this to our clients, but we practice it too.

It's been just over a year since we redesigned silverstripe.com and the best way to check whether it's meeting the goals of our users is to usability test it. We're planning to do this over the next couple of months, initially via a short questionnaire and then with face-to-face interviews in Wellington.

In late July we'll be asking interested users the reasons why they visit both silverstripe.com and silverstripe.org and for details of what they're looking for when they're there. In August we'll be inviting test users to come into the SilverStripe office in Wellington, where we'll run through a series of scenarios to test how they navigate through our sites, and we'll then explore areas that could be improved.

After collating and reviewing all the results we're hoping to better understand exactly what our users (you guys!) want from our sites and how they should be structured to make them as user-friendly as possible.

We're interested in talking with a range of users, including developers, designers and clients. If you're keen on participating then please contact Julian (J) Meadow, our resident usability testing expert, and he'll send you more details. Those that participate in both stages will be rewarded with an iTunes or book voucher.

Of course, anytime you have feedback on our sites you are always more than welcome to let us know by filling in a feedback form, which can be accessed via the the footer on both sites. We really appreciate your comments, so keep them coming!

We'll keep you posted on progress over the next couple of months.