The theme of this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) was The Web in Turbulent Times. IWMW ”provides an opportunity for those involved in the provision of institutional Web services to hear about institutional case studies, national initiatives and emerging technologies and to actively participate in a number of parallel sessions”. The event is organised by UKOLN.

During the workshop, there were a couple of BarCamp sessions. Having attended BarCamp Bradford and BarCamp Newcastle, it was great to see this kind of session. The idea is that the participants write on a flipchart sheet anything they want to give a session on, and people are free to attend whichever session they want. There were two thirty minute sessions.

Just before the BarCamp, I was chatting with Helen Ghaly from the University of Salford about Usability Testing, and I said I’d run a BarCamp on it. So up my name went on the board. About a dozen people turned up. We were a bit late starting, so I only had 25 minutes, and in those 25 minutes, I managed to:

• Identify a client with a website which wanted testing
• Recruit a participant for the usability test
• Develop a task list with the client
• Develop a persona and scenario for the test
• Give the participant training
• Conduct the usability test
• Facilitate a discussion with observers on their usability observations

If you’d like to know more about Instant Usability Testing, take a look at http://www.extremeusability.co.uk