Before games come to market, they undergo several tests: Are there technical glitches? Can players easily get started? Is the gameplay what the designers intended? Sara Verrilli discusses how and why to conduct focus testing." name="Description
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Tagged with “technical”
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Internet Archive
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Twenty: Chris Ashworth
Do you know about QLab? It’s the software you want if you’re running sound. Doesn’t matter if it’s a storefront or a stadium, a church or a theatre, this is the program for you. QLab allows you to control audio, video, and MIDI from a single workspace. If you don’t run sound for your venue, ask your sound people–they’ll tell you why this is a big deal.
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Podcast: A Practical Guide to Information Architecture, with Donna Spencer | I'd Rather Be Writing
Donna Spencer is the author of A Practical Guide to Information Architecture as well as two other books (on card sorting and writing for the web). She’s an experienced information architect, based in Australia, who gives regular workshops on information architecture at conferences such as the IA Summit and also runs the UX Australia conference. In this podcast we talk about information architecture, especially in the context of technical communication. Some of the topics we cover include the following:
What information architecture is, especially in contrast to content strategy and user experience Why writers are well suited for information architecture Reasons for doing user research prior to building your information architecture Determining user terminology (and dangers of choosing the wrong terms, even if people use them) Evaluating browse versus search, and the problem of looking for information without knowing the right terms Strategies for dealing with overlapping categories and difficult-to-fit topics Why organizing content by audience can be tricky Using focused entry points to serve different audiences Finding what you need when you don’t know what you need Organizing content by popularity, and other alternative classification schemes Scenario driven testing with index cards Card sorting strategies, tools, and limits Reasons for brainstorming IA off-screen, without your computer. Determining the number of top-level navigation options Providing navigation through next and related links Beginning the information architecture at the content page rather than the home page The kind of content to add to your home page I highly recommend this book as well as learning more about information architecture in general. For more information about Donna Spencer, see her site, Maad Mob. For more information on her book, see A Practical Guide to Information Architecture. You can follow Donna on Twitter @maadonna.
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ARCast.TV: Pat Helland on Memories, Guesses and Apologies
Microsoft Podcasts. Audience: Developer/ Product: Architecture Part 2 of Patrick Weikle’s interview with Pat Helland where he talks about the framing of unreliability and eventual consistency of transactions.
Tagged with architecture technical transactions consistency
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DPCRadio: Technical Debt
Speaker: Elizabeth Naramore Technical debt is something that most project teams or independent developers have to deal with – we take shortcuts to push out releases, we don’t focus on quality, deadlines need to be met, quick fixes slowly become the standard. Whatever the reason, if we don’t manage our technical debt (not unlike financial debt), before too long our applications are technically bankrupt, and we are forced to completely refactor and start anew.
In this talk, we will discuss what technical debt is, when it is acceptable and when it isn’t, and strategies for effectively managing it, both on an independent and team level. We’ll talk about how it affects the entire team and how to work through minimizing it, as well as working effectively as a team to address it.