For those following Flock and wishing to get involved, bug verification is an ideal entrance. You can do as much (or as little!) as you want, and you can exercise your creativity and ingenuity on the way.

P.S. If it looks familiar to anyone, that’s because it’s adapted from an obscure tutorial I wrote for Eazel five years ago.

So, hi. I’m Eli. I help Lloyd test Flock.

Before Flock, I worked with Vera at Netscape during the "browser wars". At Netscape, I helped out on Mozilla testing, and wrote the original Mozilla QA website. From there, I met Bart, Ian and Robin at another start-up, Eazel. (If you’re really curious, you can read my gory past.)

One of the reasons I’m glad to work at Flock is that Bart encourages us to experiment, take risks, and to push our individual boundaries. So, I was excited when Bart gave Vera and me the green light to pursue usability testing at Flock on the side.

We’ve now completed Flock’s first round of usability testing.

In these tests, we invited four people who hadn’t previously used Flock to configure their blog account, to create a blog post, and to tinker with the user interface and share their thoughts.

Here’s what we saw:

#1: Some critical parts of the interface are hard to discover. Particularly difficult was the topbar menu, Flickr ID field and login link, and the Blog toolbar button.

#2: Some parts of the interface are confusing. Our test participants were confused by the Favorites topbar, the star button, and by the idea of Collections.

#3: The blogging tools still need more work if they’re going to be valuable for casual bloggers, such as LiveJournal users. Most people are already happy with how they blog today – although they felt posting photos is a big pain through today’s web-based blogging interfaces.

#4: The "Flock Faves" default collection confused people. They wanted transparent access to information about their own interests and friends, not about Flock and its contributors.

Vera wrote an engaging report detailing the results. (I also spent a day in iMovie creating a 30 minute highlight reel, but our test participant contracts don’t allow us to share it here. Sorry!)

Another reason why I like working at Flock is that developers actually listen to feedback, and genuinely care about making users happy. My friends in usability tell me that it’s a battle to convince engineers to listen to usability test results, let alone make improvements.

Here at Flock, the entire company came out to watch the highlight reel. Even Stella. And our developers are already tweaking the product interface to fix these problems, starting with the upcoming Cardinal release. Yay Flock!