Well, 95% complete. The first users have their accounts and will be looking around the site tomorrow. Arena4 is a learning community product that I have been working on. I was asked to redesign the user interface in October. The product was working but needed to be rebuilt from a usability and design perspective. A task I have now pretty much completed.

The project has been quite a big one and hard as I haven’t been paid cash. I am a shareholder in the company as this is a new venture. I’m happy with that, even though my finances have come close to the wire on several occasions. Today is a case in point, my rent went out successfully, but I only have £12 left in my account!

However, I’m very chuffed with the product. Only now am I starting to be able to move naturally around the site and use it. As I do, I swell with pride. As a budding usability professional one of my key concerns is that unless you use a product, you can’t really know its faults and advantages. I feel that I need to use Arena4 more really, but it seems to work OK despite being designed kind of as individual chunks. I may ask Mat, another budding usability professional and a close friend, to review it for me. See what he comes up with.

From here it really starts to get interesting, to see what the users do with our baby. Which bits will baffle, which save time? Will they use things as I designed them to be used or will they rebel against the structure and revert to email? That’s the worst-case scenario. Sadly, if that happens it will most likely be because they can’t gain value from the product rather than due to interface incongruities, which would mean we have really failed. We’re planning to do a round of questionnaires in a couple of weeks, guage the response from the group.