Category: UI Tools

Just got wind of a new private beta, called TapeFailure. It sounds pretty exciting to me, and takes web analytics a step forward. By inserting a small 10k script in your page you can record and playback the actions a user takes on your web page.

I’ll be interesting to see how this pans out, and what affects it has on performance. If it works ok, I can see it becoming a fantastic way to do really discounted, cheap and dirty usability evaluation. Although you clearly won’t have access to the user directly, it should give some great insights on what users are doing in-situ and unaware of the monitoring.

Clearly, there may be some privacy issues, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.

At Acumentum we always test our designs on multiple browsers. As we all know, one of the great pains in our business is getting a design to look, as it should, across a variety of browsers.

Internet Explorer 6 is still the most common browser on the web, yet in our office most people are running Firefox 2.0 and IE7. This makes quick testing, as you go, a pain, as IE5, IE5.5, IE6 and IE7 cannot co-exist on the same machine…or at least that used to be the case.

One of the enterprising lads in the office found that some clever people at Tredosoft have created an installer (10.3 MB) that allows you to have all versions of IE available on the same machine.

This is one of the most useful tools I’ve seen this year.