Glasgow gained a new home for its museum of transport at the start of the summer. A wonderful architectural work by the legendary Zaha Hadid, the Riverside Museum is now open for all to visit and I have recently completed in excess of 20 hours at and near the building in order to assess the space for usability. I’m doing this of my own accord rather than having been contracted for it – which means I get to post my results to the wider world!

The reason for this is simple: I have started to look at how I can expand my usability skills and services to include spaces in addition to web sites, software and real world items. A brand new public museum is the ideal testing ground to work out both the analysis stage and how to report it, so that’s the reason and location covered.

As I have only just completed the analysis phase, it will be at least a couple of weeks while I work out the most suitable reporting format and prepare it from the dozens of pages of notes, hundreds of photographs and reasonable number of videos I need to work through.

For now, I’ll provide you with this teaser video which shows me using one of the public feedback touchscreen terminals sited around the museum. You can clearly see me press the characters and watch them appear in the free form text field at the top … and you can clearly see the characters highlighting green as the systems process what I’ve touched.

Slow? That would be a fairly generous way to phrase it! It’s so slow, anyone who can type even moderately well is likely to become infuriated with the inability to tell when they’ve made an error. You might also note towards the end that I’m typing blind as the key strokes are still being accepted, yet they’re off to the right of the screen with no ability to tell they’re being recorded correctly at all!