reactivePixel

Well Timed Inspiration

It’s 12am I’m driving home from a long day with little sleep prior and coming off of a road trip to Michigan. All I can focus on is how good my bed will feel once I’m home after the 40 min. drive from Canton Ohio to Streetsboro. That is until I realize I’m thinking about work.

Enter basecamp, the cloud based project managment software we use to coordinate most all aspects of our projects and collaboration. All aspects with the exception of our daily high level team status updates.

Being able to quickly determine an upcoming opening in the schedule to slip a smaller project for a client is crutial for fast turn around times on small items while hitting the larger milestones.

This all gets me thinking about the basecamp api and using it to extend the system’s functionality further to better suit the needs of our clients. I’ll take some time tomorrow to put something together and post it’s progress as this idea matures.

Usability Testing: University of Akron

We all can take a best guess at how our target audiences use our sites /applications. Focus groups help to tear apart a larger site with many cross links and lots of information and show where the weak points are in the flow of the user’s experience.

Today The Karcher Group will be pilot testing a usability test welcome to the department of redundancy department on The University of Akron’s Website with the help of the University of Akron and the Morae software package. It is a handy app that allows helps us monitor a test group of users’ interactions while accomplishing several defined tasks.

The tasks we have set up for the users are :

1. Navigate to the main Akron University website
2. From the homepage, locate the course curriculum for the program of Graphic Design
3. From this location, determine the Financial Aid contact information
4. From this location, locate where to apply online

The tasks seem simple enough but what we are measuring is what actually paths the test users are taking though the site and sub sites to get to complete each task. After the data is obtained we will use some additional features in Morae to present this data and determine just how many users found the optimal path, which found unique paths, and if any were unable to complete the tasks.

Results and breakdown analysis to follow up after completion.

Home:The Karcher Group [TKG]

To give a bit of back story about who I am and what I bring to the world you need to know a little bit about the company that I work for, The Karcher Group. TKG is a Web Design, Web Marketing and Web Hosting firm in North Canton, Ohio, with over 10 years in the business. As a birthday present to ourselves we recently acquired TKG.com

The competitive advantage that we offer is that we are a Web Development and Search Engine Optimization / Web Marketing firm. Why would a client have their site / web application developed by one company and have the SEO and SEM handled by another?

The most exciting thing that we offer our clients is that our team of professionals can dream up, and bring to reality, most anything. We strive to learn our clients businesses and create custom applications around their custom needs. Because of all the custom work we also offer Web Hosting and Server Colocation services.

With everything in house we are able to provide a streamlined solution that doesn’t get hung up between IT companies trying to squeeze each other out of the picture and outsource some part to India.

We have a handful of creative individuals that have established themselves in the industry as well as the community. We have people that have come to us from yahoo and there are so many of us involved with professional organizations and groups in the community I will just list my own credits.

I am a member of the Stark State Technology Advisory Committee, Cleveland Web Standards Group, I created and managed a Macromedia Users Group that focused on advanced Flash, and a few other items but I’ll just be brief.

My focus is programming, I excel in coordinating efforts projects from idea to reality.