The usability team has been going non-stop with 13-hour+ days for the last four days in Baltimore. Yesterday we wrapped up the bulk of our testing and sifted through the results from Friday's marathon of tests (7 hours of testing, almost all back-to-back). Big hugs go out to PingVision and Matt Tucker (ultimateboy) for treating us to a nice Indian dinner last night. You can't know how much that was appreciated by a very tired and hungry crew. :-)
This morning we gave ourselves a bit of a break so we could sleep in and let our brains rest. We'll be meeting back at the lab around noon to prep for our last test subject of the study. After that test is done, we will do a big pass through all of our notes and stickies on the wall (we have some more from when I took this picture on day 2) to organize the issues and articulate them well enough to be added as issues to the Drupal.org issue queue. We also need to scrub all of the data and videos that we have to make sure no personally identifying information is there. We need to ensure the testers' anonymity. Once we pull all of that together, we will start to work on the Drupalcon DC presentation so we can share the big points that we learned in the last week and what we can do about it. We'll have audio and video clips along with information and issues to talk about. Hopefully the big snow (6-11 inches) headed our way tonight won't mess up continuing work on Monday too much, but thankfully all of the testing itself will be completed as of this afternoon. (You may wonder why some snow would bother people in a city too much, but Brab (beeradb) and Nat (catch) are staying at my house which is quite a distance from Baltimore and we drive 40 minutes to the lab each day.)
I'm going to post a wrap-up of the entire experience on Tuesday but so far, other than the main issues we have uncovered or reaffirmed, some of the big take-aways for me are how awesome people are, and seriously big respect for the work and effort of people who take part in usability studies, on both sides of the glass.