[00:00:08.710] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.100] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.580] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.430] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.590] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week with Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And welcome back to those who've been with us before and welcome to those who haven't. So, another seven days. How has it been for you? Any news?
[00:00:33.350] - Taylor
I'm still struggling with my tiredness, but I'm kind of slowly getting there. Each day I'm I think getting a tiny bit more energy than I have the day before, but making sure I don't do too much to cause the next day to do nothing, so it's...
[00:00:49.430] - Gordon
Okay.
[00:00:50.120] - Taylor
Steady.
[00:00:51.230] - Gordon
And Thursday, yesterday, was a busy day for you, wasn't it? Because you have BNI in the morning and then sort of like a full day and you're trying to sort of catch some sleep between meetings, I guess.
[00:01:06.140] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:08.030] - Gordon
Okay, so I don't think I have any news at all. So straight on to our topics. Would you like to go first or shall I?
[00:01:17.900] - Taylor
I would like to, actually.
[00:01:18.680] - Gordon
Right, off you go.
[00:01:23.310] - Taylor
This week is what is my topic, but I have been thinking about moving out and getting my own property, and part of that means living by myself. Now, this week I am going to be looking after a family friend's dog, cat and fish as they are going away. And so we thought it would be a great chance for me to kind of spend some time living by myself, having to do all of the things that you have to do when you live by yourself. So cooking, cleaning, washing up.
[00:02:02.920] - Gordon
Feeding animals.
[00:02:03.830] - Taylor
Feeding animals, and also, obviously washing my clothes and stuff. And so we thought it would be a great chance for me to actually experience what it's like and see if I like it. Otherwise I'll be staying here forever! Or just to see how I get on and see what things I struggle with, and how I can obviously make sure that I can make it livable and something that's not a constant drain. So that is something that I'm going to be doing this week and it's very exciting.
[00:02:34.110] - Gordon
So that's starting today.
[00:02:36.130] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:02:37.350] - Gordon
And you are in charge of several animals. You also get to decide what you do during the day, but you're not going to have lots of things done for you like you do when you live at home. So when you live at home, you have a magic washing basket, you have all the bills paid for you. What you should do, in fact, is sort of work out estimated bills as to what they would be based on the period of time that you are house sitting.
[00:03:10.230] - Taylor
Yep.
[00:03:10.230] - Gordon
Not sure you mentioned that. You're actually house sitting at their house as well. So all the animals are staying in their own house and you're just looking after them there, which is going to be lovely. Yeah. I mean you are quite an independent person anyway; you run your own business. What do you think, before you've experienced it, is going to be your biggest problem?
[00:03:34.590] - Taylor
I think, not problem to start with, but the biggest advantage I think for me is I have full control over everything. And so although living at home people try not to disturb me, they inevitably do even if they don't come in, people are still making noises. People are still doing other stuff and so living by myself I decide when I want to eat. Which I do anyway. But the dinners for example I can decide when I'm hungry, rather than kind of forcing everyone else in the family to eat at the time that I want to eat. Because sometimes I eat a lot earlier than others. But also I think being able to get the amount of work that I'm able to do, I think will be a lot higher just because there's not that interruption. And so I think the biggest issue to that would be making sure I keep focus, because I think as long as I can get into a rhythm and routine and stuff I think I'll be okay. Making sure that I take it at a pace that is possible for me, but just making sure that I get into the rhythm because once I'm in the zone of coding or doing emails and things like that I actually am very productive and I don't find... My energy levels are very, very high. And this goes back to the working genius that I did and finding out why certain tasks drain energy and why certain tasks give me lots of energy and things like that. So I think that would be the struggle but also the upside to it. So it'll be interesting to see when I have zero distractions and zero excuses, do I strive and do well?
[00:05:21.560] - Gordon
But also you have to do your own cooking, you have to do your own washing up, you're own cleaning and everything else, and does that take the amount of time that you're distracted at home to be equal?
[00:05:35.720] - Taylor
Yeah, because obviously that would be part of the routine. Hopefully if I can build it up then hopefully that will... I'm going to need to be setting a lot of alarms, because there's lots of different people that I've got to be feeding at different times and different activities like walks and things like that. So yeah, just keeping an eye on everything is going to be important. I think I'm going to need to set up a house list or to-do list of things that may not be like routine stuff so obviously eating breakfast, feeding the animals and stuff, but more things of like okay, I need to remember to put the washing on for example, which is a one off thing, not a recurring daily thing. So things like that where I can just keep a tab on things that I need to do, that I otherwise don't have to worry about at home.
[00:06:22.630] - Gordon
Okay, so scheduling is a big thing that you think. It's going to be an interesting experiment. You get to see what it's like living outside of the family home. So I wish you all the best. It's a big step to take. Moving out of the family home was a big step for me, and I think it will be for Taylor as well. So I hope it all goes well.
[00:06:47.480] - Taylor
Thank you.
[00:06:48.220] - Gordon
Maybe you'll come back and tell us about your experiences afterwards.
[00:06:52.660] - Taylor
It won't be next Friday because obviously I'll be there, but the Friday after, we should hopefully.
[00:06:59.670] - Gordon
Yes. We may not have an episode next week, it all depends because he's not actually too far away, so we could meet up, possibly to do a video, but we'll have to see. We may not be on next week, we may be, who knows?
[00:07:13.430] - Taylor
Cool. That was my topic for this week.
[00:07:15.280] - Gordon
Fantastic. So my topic this week is all about beta testing. So for those who don't understand that term, beta testing is when something has been built and you are testing it to make sure it does what it's supposed to do. Now, I do a lot of this with websites and I've got quite good at it. Stress testing a website, finding things that don't work as they should do, making changes that make things better, that sort of thing. That's all part of beta testing. And some people find it very difficult because, let's take for example, a website. If you beta test a website, which you should do, you can look at it and you can try and find the information that you've been asked to go and find, which is a good way of beta testing, getting people to do tasks for you on your website: you know, "tell me what time my office is open from and to on a Tuesday," and see how quickly they can actually find that information. But if you beta test, sometimes people find it very easy to do, and things pop out at them very quickly, which is what happens for me. And other times there's people who just look at it and go, "do you know what, I don't know, there's something wrong with this, but I don't know what it is." And it could just be that there's functionality that's not working. It could be that your user experience, 'UX,' is not good.
[00:08:57.590] - Taylor
Or the design's slightly shifted off, that sometimes can be annoying.
[00:09:01.420] - Gordon
Yeah.
[00:09:01.770] - Taylor
And just throw a whole page off. You can't put your finger on it because you don't have measurements, but that can throw off your eyes of what you want them to be focusing on.
[00:09:13.540] - Gordon
Yeah. And for example, on a website, two things that I've found to be very annoying and easy to fix are when you're looking at content on a mobile device, for example, and you scroll down and you're just sitting there reading and all of a sudden everything moves and then it moves back again and you're thinking, "what's going on there? I didn't touch it!" It feels like there's a glitch on your phone or something. Normally what it is, is there's some content above that's dynamic and is changing, like testimonials, for example. If you've got that on a carousel where it changes to a different testimonial and one testimonial is slightly longer than another. So the whole of the layout will expand to allow that testimonial to be viewed and then the next one will come along and it's shorter so it all goes back up again and everything moves up.
[00:10:07.610] - Taylor
Pip Kennedy with your text, obviously different text lengths because you have kind of like changing text, rotating text that changes and obviously on a mobile will go on to a different number of lines depending on how long the word is.
[00:10:24.810] - Gordon
Exactly right. And the other issue that I've found a lot, is again on mobile, when you sort of scroll down and all of a sudden you end up going sort of diagonally slightly and you end up with all this white space on the right hand side of your website and you can just sort of scroll across and you end up with like a whole blank space which is like, "why is that happening?" And it's again down to an element being set for sort of 100% width and...
[00:10:54.570] - Taylor
Or a fixed width.
[00:10:55.180] - Gordon
A fixed width. Sorry, I'm going to have to fix this because it's slightly at an angle and it's bugging me. There you go, that's much better. So, yes, it's a fixed width which is wider than your mobile screen width is. So your mobile screen width is this width and you've set an element to be this width, all of a sudden the whole of the page has to allow for that extra wide item and therefore it just fills the blank space with white or the background colour. And so you end up with this sort of left and right shifting issue, which is again a major issue, but very easy to fix as long as you can find the element that's causing the issue.
[00:11:37.400] - Taylor
One thing too that is good, is to have a checklist. So I have a 'Project Launch Checklist,' which does similar to what you're doing in terms of testing. Where I will go through checking all contact details are correct, all contact forms work; so they actually submit and do what they're supposed to. Whether they send the data to a CRM, to an email campaign software, or even just ends up in the person's inbox that it should do; whether you're sending the recipient an email or whether the person that submits it is getting an email to, do they receive it? Another thing is like you said the width of the page on mobile, and it's responsive. Making sure that things are big enough to be clicked on for mobile, because obviously you have to account for people's fingers that if you make something that's two pixels high, you're never going to be able to click on it and your finger is never going to be able to get there. Which you might have a bit more control with a mouse because you have a bit more precision. But there's lots of things that are standard, I would say that we kind of look for and we subconsciously look for anyway. But it's good to have a checklist to remind yourself because sometimes...
[00:12:52.900] - Gordon
Totally agree.
[00:12:55.150] - Taylor
The more you have to remember, the more chance there is for error.
[00:12:58.820] - Gordon
And the other thing that you should be looking to do is to try and break your website, or whatever it is you're beta testing. What happens if you put in to a form some weird information in the telephone field or...
[00:13:15.130] - Taylor
Don't supply a valid email.
[00:13:16.520] - Gordon
I was just going to say, you just put text into an email address field, try and break the system. Does it do what it's supposed to do and give you an error? Does it alert the user that something is wrong? Does it break functionality that is supposed to happen? Etc etc. There's lots and lots of outcomes and until you try breaking the system, you will never know if the system can handle it or not. Because you can bet that somebody is going to come and visit your website, your service, your software, whatever the thing is that you're beta testing, and they will attempt to do something that you hadn't accounted for. And if they do that, what's going to happen?
[00:14:05.280] - Taylor
So you need to make sure you've got error handling. Now that's different to just getting an error. So if you try and do something and it just breaks, that's just an error. But if you have error handling, you have stuff in place, very much like if you run a business, you will have a lot of things set in place for if something happens. If water is spilled, there will be a procedure that you have to follow to make sure that it's cleaned up and everything's been done safely and properly. It's a similar thing, making sure the error handling is in place for whatever you're doing. And, there was something else I was going to say, I can't remember.
[00:14:40.970] - Gordon
So beta testing is basically very important. It's a really important step.
[00:14:45.590] - Taylor
So making sure you ask people that are your target audience, but not your target audience. Because sometimes you may have people that end up on your site that aren't your target audience, but they're just looking, either for a friend... There's many times when I've gone on to Google and searched for something that is for somebody else, it's not my type of website I would go onto for me, but it's for someone else, and I still need to make sure I can navigate it. So making sure the language you use, the buttons that you use are all, from a UI perspective, accessible and easy to understand.
[00:15:26.870] - Gordon
Yeah. So there you go. That is beta testing. It's a really important step and it's a step that a lot of people don't go through. I was just going to say, as a customer, if you have a company that is building you a website, then you get to be the beta tester. You need to go through it, but get your, as Taylor said, target audience to also test it as well. Ask your most loyal customers just to have a look at your new site and to see if there's anything that they think is missing, information they think they might need that they can't find, or anything that's just throwing an error. It's really important.
[00:16:09.010] - Taylor
Sometimes you try and be clever with your design, and what you think is helping the end user is actually a hindrance, because you've not only changed the style and the layout, but you've completely moved the location. And so, especially if you've got an older generation target audience moving something further away that they don't assume is going to be where it is, they're not going to be able to use it, not going to be able to find it, you're going to have lots of support tickets going, "I can't find this." And you go, "oh, it's here." And it's like, "well, why did you move it? It was perfectly fine." Sometimes it's got to be... You want it to be dumb. You don't want to be clever sometimes when you're dealing with existing...
[00:16:53.630] - Gordon
Keep it simple.
[00:16:54.790] - Taylor
Software. But, yeah, that was pretty much everything really.
[00:16:59.880] - Gordon
Good. Well, that's everything that I wanted to say on that. If you've got any experience with beta testing, maybe a horror story or a success story, then please leave a comment, we'd love to hear about it and I'm sure other viewers will also be interested in hearing about it.
[00:17:18.040] - Taylor
It's very easy to see who has done testing and who hasn't, because you see people post their all new website and you go on and the first thing you see is an error and it's like, "well you obviously didn't check this, and test it."
[00:17:33.290] - Gordon
Exactly right. And also, as a final thought, spell checking and grammar checking. Make sure that everything makes sense. There's nothing worse than turning up to a website and it not being professionally grammar checked and spell checked. Really important. So that's it for me.
[00:17:54.010] - Taylor
And me as well.
[00:17:55.160] - Gordon
As always, you can view us on Facebook and on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.
[00:18:02.720] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk, to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about in the past.
[00:18:10.790] - Gordon
Until next week, we'll be here at 1p.m., possibly, next week. If not, it will be the week after, so please join us then. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:18:23.650] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:18:26.280] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:18:26.690] - Taylor
Bye.
