Comments on: Mercaptan

By: #9: Measure everything « Rowan Simpson

#9: Measure everything « Rowan Simpson — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 06:25:10 +0000

[...] Mercaptan, on error logging [...]

By: alan

alan — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 02:26:50 +0000

It’s definitely hard to tell the full ‘soft error’ story with purely quant data, but using heatmaps and quant analysis of clicktrails can help tell some of the story. In the meantime, nothing does a better job of identifying ‘soft errors’ than regular user testing in a lab environment. If you think you’ve spotted a possible soft error with one user, sit another 10 down and ask them to follow the same path, and see if they hit the same problem.

By the way, there’s no need to go whacking a gas main with a pickaxe to try the smell of mercaptan for yourself. Just serve a meal to a group of friends/family and make sure you include some asparagus in the ingredients.

One of the byproducts of digesting asparagus is mercaptan, which is rapidly expressed in urine in levels high enough to be clearly noticeable. So why test a group of people and not just yourself? Well, the expression of mercaptan is a common (but not universal) genetic trait which you may not have, and the ability to smell mercaptan may also be genetically linked – see this piece on http://www.webmd.com

…can’t believe the Wikipedia entry didn’t mention this! At last, a chance to contribute something substantial to Wikipedia! W00t!

By: Sam

Sam — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:46:47 +0000

I’ve often wondered if the numbers can tell us more about what is really happening with users. That would be the holy grail to fully understand from a quant perspective what people are struggling with. And suppose a site is then smart enough to automatically adjust to the problem (which has been compared against a large library of known issues and recommended responses)?

While I don’t think we could ever get numbers to tell the full story about what’s happening for users, there seems to be very little being done to even make an attempt at this. Does Trademe do anything of the sort?

By: Pete

Pete — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:02:11 +0000

I once had the misfortune of looking after a web application a few years ago that did a ridiculous amount of logging for client-side validation errors, page views and a whole host of other things. Other than poor database design (the logging table corrupted no less than twice), it seemed to work well for generating the reports the application’s owners needed and was a big help in helping users with cookie problems.
I had planned (when I get the time) to look into using Ajax as a way of logging and capturing page viewed/interaction times and events.