I sat down with a few friends the other day to do some usability testing, after reading this article. I thought I’d sit them in front of my first run experience and ask them to do some very basic operations:

1. Create a task
2. Create a project.
3. View a task.
4. Create a milestone.
5. Assign a task to a user.
6. etc

Well it turns out I didn’t get very far as I hoped I would. They both failed at step one, neither of them could see the main menu. This is obviously bad, really bad. So an emergency rethink needed, in the below screenshot you can see the new dashboard interface with the old menu system. The main menu is in dark orange on a light orange background, making it easy to see on a bright monitor – but camouflaged into the background on darker ones.

Below you can see the new menu system:

We’ve made the following changes:

• Reduced the items in the main menu, this should help keep the interface simple and focused.
• A new user submenu(top left), this menu will contain information about the person logged in.
• The search bar has moved(top right), this helps to conserve space for the rest of the screen.
• The main menu is now on the right, and is in big black text making it stand out – more importantly hard to miss.

After these changes, both friends could use the application and complete the tasks given to them – a massive improvement.

We’ll probably tweak this more over the coming months, but I learnt a very valuable lesson:

Watch someone else use your application.