User Experience at telerik

by ASP.NET AJAX Team | Comments 2
For the last half a year, we’ve been quietly revolutionizing software development here at telerik, trying to integrate a thought about the user on all stages of product development. While we really wanted to improve the User Experience, we were very careful not to go too far with needlessly expensive usability best-practices – we believe the smartest solutions are usually the simplest solutions, so we looked around for a way to measure usability that would not involve furnishing a state-of-the-art recording studio and flying users over continents. For a start, we thought we just needed to observe users interact with telerik products – from the comfort of their home or office, in the context of their desktop, browser, and IDE. This is how the telerik remote testing program was born – we have been meeting with developers and end-users on all continents through online conference tools to watch them user interact with our products, hunt down frustrations and come up with ways to improve the experience.

UE initiatives at telerik are already resulting in better products, innovation ideas, and decreased release time from making iterations early on in production cycles, before development starts. While we are now more than ever aware of the many problems in our product line, this is the first step in our commitment to go beyond providing bug-free software towards offering a frustration-free, fun experience not just for our customers, but for their customers as well.

To give an idea of our work so far, we compiled a summary with user experience issues uncovered during a test with r.a.d.grid end-users. Last November we run a series of tests to evaluate how end-users (business professionals and data-entry clerks, New York area) perform tasks with r.a.d.grid. This preview outlines some of the most common problems – some of those were already addressed in our last Q4 2006 release, and the rest will be resolved in the upcoming r.a.d.grid updates.

Later next month I will be speaking at the WebDD event in Reading, UK sharing our experience with remote user testing. The event is shaping up as a great place to exchange know-how for web developers and designers, and I would love to talk to any of you planning to visit. My colleague Hristo Deshev will be talking about AJAX components, so drop us a line if you are up for a tech talk or… a tech beer.

About the author

Iana Tsolova

Iana Tsolova

is Program Manager of Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX division. She joined the company back in the beginning of 2008 as a Support Officer and has since occupied various positions at Telerik, including Senior Support Officer, Team Lead at one of the ASP.NET AJAX teams and Technical Support Director. Iana’s main interests are web development, reading articles related to geography, wild nature and latest renewable energy technologies.

2 Comments

Joe
It is nice to see a company that is interested in it's customer's level of experience while interacting with its products. That is quite refreshing.

I really like the telerik products. I think they are very robust and re-usable for endless numbers of situations. However, I have found the documentation of these products to be quite lacking.

I would consider myself to be 6.5 on a 10 scale of development ability. I have been programming in .NET since 2002. I have found in my experience with .NET more than any previous language, that there are a million ways to accomplish the same goal. The broadness and expansive class base of .NET makes that possible. I believe this is what makes .NET a great language platform.

That stated, for me as a rather advanced developer using the telerik controls, there are many things that don't work the same way that I learned how to do them prior to using telerik controls. I have had the most trouble with the Rad Grid. I found there were many different hurdles to me getting to my goal, that I have never ran into using standard .NET grids. I have found the support at telerik to be wonderful. Most of my questions I post on the forums, and have received a quick and pleasant response from the staff and MVP's. However, this interaction might not have been necessary had the documentation been more complete. There were a few things that were really simple that with a simple blurb or note in the documentation for consideration, would have eliminated the time it took to post, wait, and respond in the forums.

The very basic programming items are covered well along with the basic events. But when developing large applications, I have found these topics rarely covered if at all. For example, there is a very small section dealing with user controls as edit forms. To me this is a great feature, but the documentation on how to use this is not up to par. I realize that the documentation is meant for everyone and that some advanced features may only be used by 5 or 10 percent of telerik users.

So when thinking about the user experience, please don't forget to beef up the documentation. That will go a long way to help the advanced programmer! Thanks.
Zhivko Dimitrov
Hi Joe, thank you for getting back with feedback! While this is an issue that the whole company works hard to improve, here at the UX team we are at present specifically involved with a number of projects addressing your needs for better documentation.

First and most important of all, we try to make better use of all the resources we already have - we have just launched a major revision of our support section - http://www.telerik.com/support - you will be surprised how many of your issues have already been raised in our forums or are present in the documentation but you couldn't find them. With the implementation of a google search mechanism for all of our support resources, we hope we will be able to better utilize all existing support resources.

Second, we are adding more to documentation. My team is at present compiling new skinning tutorials for a number of products and those will be included in the upcoming releases. Previews available at telerik.com/skins.

Next step will be a complete revamp of our online help framework, which at present is not search-engine friendly and this makes finding information a pain. We are in the development stages of a new custom framework for our online help system that will allow both better search and online collaboration from users.

We are aware of this serious issue and I would like to assure you we are investing a lot in this direction. I am certain that we will be seeing huge advances in the very near future.

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