What kind of business can you build in 54 hours? That’s the challenge at every Startup Weekend event and the group in attendance at the M@dison building for Startup Weekend Detroit was more than up to the challenge. Six of us from Atomic Object made the trek out to the event to participate. We built,... Brittany and I recently created a usability test overview that aimed to summarize our test findings with clarity and brevity. You can download the template here. We designed our test scenarios using our usability starter kit templates. The starter kit templates made sure our testing session was organized and our tests were consistent. Rather than…
We sometimes help customers build proof-of-concept products for internal demonstration, or better yet, run at a trade show in front of their customers and competitors. We help define features, scope and budget, drive code with tests, and deliver continuously to provide as much control over the demo as possible. Sounds almost like production code. Though…
Good usability testing takes a fair amount of planning. In order to get quality feedback from your test participants, it is essential to carefully craft your tasks ahead of time, make sure your software is ready for users to play with it, and make sure everyone on your team is in agreement when it comes…
Objection, the dependency injection library initially written for the iOS application SideReel, is over a year old. Shawn Anderson and I created it when he candidly pointed out how awkward my previous attempts at Dependency Injection were in Objective-C (NIB, manual construction, factory methods). Shawn’s honesty (something we all appreciate here at AO) motivated me…
Even since cavemen invented the wheel, people have been using specially designed tools to make their work and their day-to-day lives simpler. Can you think of a single profession today that does not benefit from the use of a tool of some kind? In an ideal world, a tool would be something that you invest…
Tmux has been getting a lot of attention lately. As George Nachman works toward a deeper integration of iTerm2 with tmux, more people are becoming aware of the ‘other’ terminal multiplexer. Around the office, people have been asking how I use tmux. While I’m also an avid iTerm2 user, I’m not sure if the new…
Last fall, prompted at least in part by Simon Sinek’s TEDx talk “How great leaders inspire action”, Carl discussed his evolving thoughts about identifying the why of Atomic Object. I ran across his post again a few weeks ago while catching up on some reading. It hasn’t left my spare mental cycles alone since. Such…
Recently one of our teams at AO worked with a client to do 2 days’ worth of usability testing with real users. I acted as the test facilitator for this project. As the test facilitator, I greeted test participants when they showed up, explained how the test would work, and walked them through the tasks…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object