Marissa Christy | Atomic Spin

Usability testing for simple websites

By Marissa Christy | Published: December 9, 2011

The reasons for and ways of accomplishing usability studies on complex web applications are well documented. They increase user satisfaction and retention, they reduce user frustration and training — in short they add business value in obvious ways. There are a lot of known ways of doing this testing, too. You can use discount methodologies,...

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Posted in Marketing, Testing, Usability, Visual Design, Web | 1 Comment

From Pigment to Pixels: What Art History can teach us about software design

By Marissa Christy | Published: November 15, 2011

I recently wrote about the similarities between the practice of gesture drawing in fine art and rapid paper prototyping in software design. As a former student of art now working in software, drawing comparisons between the two is something I’m wont to do. Indeed, such comparing and contrasting is the central building block of art…

Posted in Prototyping, Visual Design | Leave a comment

Heuristic evaluations: formalizing what you already knew about usability

By Marissa Christy | Published: October 5, 2011

Last week my colleague Brittany and I had the privilege of attending Usability Week 2011 in San Francisco, a conference/workshop put on by the Nielsen Norman Group. While there I attended a three day intensive training workshop on conducting usability tests. We covered everything needed to run an effective test, from creating user screeners, writing…

Posted in Usability | Tagged heuristic evaluations | 1 Comment

Rapid prototyping: a solid practice from studio art to software

By Marissa Christy | Published: September 7, 2011

I recently read Zaki Warfel’s book Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide. It’s an excellent resource for anyone interested in the vital role prototyping plays in the software design process. I was first introduced to Warfel and his book after hearing his talk at Agile 2010. Sketching, or low fidelity (lo-fi) rapid paper prototyping, is one of…

Posted in Culture, Prototyping, User Experience | 3 Comments

Capturing and Sharing iOS App Usability Tests

By Marissa Christy | Published: July 26, 2011

When usability testing, it is often desirable to record the screen of an application to either share it with a remote group of stakeholders or capture it for further review. With screen recording software and built-in webcams, testing websites on a computer is relatively simple. But testing applications and websites on mobile, and particularly iOS…

Posted in Testing, Usability | 2 Comments

A Venture Capital Cheat Sheet

By Marissa Christy | Published: July 5, 2011

Lately I’ve found myself in many conversations about startups and sources of funding. It’s a natural part of the work we do at Atomic; we build software products for other people’s businesses, and many of the new clients who reach out to us are part of startups. Locally, the Momentum program and 5×5 night have…

Posted in Business of Software, Startups | Tagged venture capital | 1 Comment

Learning through Lean Marketing

By Marissa Christy | Published: May 31, 2011

Note: This post is a follow-up to a previous post on Evaluating Banner Ads Using CPI. Earlier this Spring we ran a short campaign for duellr (an app designed to help designers and their clients make better logo decisions) with the said goal of assessing our product’s positioning and market-fit. We did this by directing…

Posted in Business of Software, Marketing, Startups | Tagged customer development, duellr, lean marketing, lean startup | 1 Comment

Comparing Banner Ads Using CPI

By Marissa Christy | Published: April 15, 2011

This year a few of us have been working on bringing a small internal web tool — duellr — to market using the principles of Customer Development. Shawn Crowley is also blogging about this journey. Duellr is a tool that helps designers reduce time and stress with logo decisions. Our minimum viable product (MVP) is…

Posted in Business of Software, Marketing, Startups | Tagged duellr, lean marketing, lean startup | 11 Comments

Hiring Update

By Marissa Christy | Published: March 28, 2011

It’s now been almost two months since Atomic launched our hiring campaign for 2011, ambitiously referred to as “10 for 11.” In the past our typical hiring methodology has been fairly passive. We’ve never rigorously recruited at career fairs or paid head hunters. We’ve generally relied on people to self-select according to the values outlined…

Posted in Company, News | Leave a comment

Help us find great people, we’ll say "thanks" with an iPad

By Marissa Christy | Published: February 1, 2011

10 for 11 Atomic is interested in adding 10 people to our molecule this year. We’re looking to hire the most talented, hardworking and happy developers, designers, and testers we can find. We realize this is an ambitious goal, and we don’t plan on filling these positions with anyone less than the best. Our Thanks…

Posted in Business of Software, Company, News | 6 Comments