I’ve developing my Twitter client Bitter for some time now. A small group of close friends have been alpha testing it for me for quite some time, reporting bugs and enhancements along the way. I’ve been tweaking things for quite a while now and feel like it’s time to go on to the next stage. Things eventually come to a point where enough is enough and you’ve got to release! Well, I’m not quite there yet…

Today begins the extended usability testing of Bitter in the form of user diaries. A user diary is basically a stream of thoughts that the user has as they are using the application. It’s a list of their real-time, unfiltered thoughts, impressions, suggestions, enhancements, weird experiences, bugs, and even feelings they have while using the application. The entries can be as big and descriptive or as short and small as the user wants. There’s no real format. Just a straight brain dump onto paper.

So what exactly is happening today? Today I sent out the release candidate of Bitter to my volunteer group of usability testers. I tried to get some old, some young, some experienced Twitter users, some noobs, some developers and some not-so-technical users. A wide variety of testers is best especially in usability testing. Not everyone has had the same experiences using software and so everyone comes in with a slightly different (or maybe even vastly different) viewpoints on how things should work. I’ve already seen a few issues while helping a less technical person sign up for Twitter and start using Bitter.

Anyway, I’ll post the outcome of all this in the near future and some lessons learned with my user diary process. Stay tuned…