This Hour

A couple weeks ago, David gave those of us at our office morning prayer a fresh idea on how to think about the Lord's Prayer. He asked us how much thought we've put into the "our" and "we" parts of it. When you pray the Lord's Prayer together with a group, try thinking of yourselves really as one body instead of individuals. When one of us trespasses, we all do. When one of us forgives, we all do. As a body, we accept responsibility for one another. What we do affects those around us. We suffer for the sake of one another, and we rejoice too with each other. Do you consider that as you are praying the Lord's Prayer?

On a separate note, I have a very small prayer, from part of the Lord's Prayer, that I use with varying frequency day to day. It is often the case that even though I know the right thing to do with my time, I am lazy or undisciplined or exhibitive of any number of the vices. It can be overwhelming to consider the vast distance between what I'm doing or have done, and what I ought to be doing or have done. One solution that I use, that follows the "baby steps" mentality, is to adjust the "Give us this day" portion of the Lord's Prayer, and pray instead for "This [smallest unit of time for which I need help or courage or stamina]". That usually means "this hour". I don't particularly pray the whole prayer, I just pray those two words, and they often help to dispel my sloth. It's sort of like the burst of energy you get in the last mile of a race. But it's also a prayer.

Usability Testing

Yesterday as I was finishing a feature on the new Trinity Schools website, Jeremy and I were discussing the way it would work for users. We were clicking around, trying different things, and generally hypothesizing about the thought process of our intended users and what they would experience. Conversation lulled, and I sort of set the issue down and began looking at something else. Jeremy was jotting down notes on a notecard. Then he stood up to leave the room and asked me to come with him. "What for?" "Well, are you coming?" "ummm.... ok..."

I followed him down to the first floor of Raclin to the Vine & Branches office where he requested a few minutes of time each from Anne, Elizabeth, and Gretchen. He then asked each of them to pull up my development version of the website, and walked through the script he had jotted down, asking them to do simple things on the website that would expose the effect of the website on unbiased users. "See this new thing? It's pretty cool." "Can you go do this?" "Now get back to this area." One thing it meant was to not explain how to do anything. Just tell them to do something, and sit back and watch. It was incredibly instructive to me! Without asking somebody to think about how they would do something, we simply watched them try, and learned from reality instead of theory. We immediately had 2-3 changes to make, which may seem rather innocuous, but we are continually realizing these things can make a difference.

Thanks for the live experiment, Jeremy! This appeared to be very simple because of the JavaScript library we use, so the new challenge becomes how to perform this testing in more complex areas.