On August 15, Waverly was buzzing with excitement as over a dozen Jenga experts gathered to test their skills.

We needed to make sure the playing fields were level within 1° of accuracy. Luckily, the Carpenter’s Level app for the Palm Pre made this easy.

A few of the players had already signed up for Tournology before showing up at the tournament. The rest of the competitors had to create accounts, and register for the tournament. We worked on several improvements to the signup process since our Pitch tournament, and it seemed to go much smoother than the last time.

Tensions were high as the first Jenga blocks were extracted from their nestled cocoons.

Like Icarus, some were too grand in their ambitions, and Jenga-ed a bit too hard. One could almost hear the melting of wings as blocks tumbled to the ground.

The competition was fierce, but friendly.

As the Final Countdown played in the background (looped is probably a more appropriate phrase), the contest came between John and Karli.

In the end, there could be Only One, and Karli ended up walking away with the grand prize.

Congratulations to everyone who participated, and thanks for helping beta test Tournology!  You can see the results of both Round Robin groups here and here.

Jenga.

We present Jengology, Tournology’s second hosted tournament.  Here’s what you need to know:

• The game is Jenga. We’ll provide the tables, block sets, and keep the throngs of screaming fans away from the matches.
• We’re playing on Saturday, August 15. the gaming starts at 1pm, and should run until about 3pm.
• The venue is the basement of Horizon Bank in Waverly, Nebraska. Need a map?
• Snacks and drinks will be provided.

Here are the rules:

• Jenga games will be played in a 1 vs 1 format. Order is decided by a coin flip.
• Standard Jenga rules apply.
• Play will be organized in a round robin format, followed by a single-elimination tournament for the top 4 competitors.
• If the tournament is large enough, we’ll split the round robin into multiple “pods”, so everyone should play in around 5 rounds.
• No Jenga guns allowed.

The final match will be played on an elegant black onyx Jenga set. And if you win, you get to take the set home as your prize for victory.

Excited? Here’s a couple options for signing up:

• Join the tournament through Tournology.
• You can also RSVP through Facebook, if you don’t want to sign up with Tournology just yet.
  

So come down to Waverly and partake in the excitement.  It’s going to be even more epic than this:

Today we’re switching the beta flag on Tournology, just as Google’s removing the beta flag from Gmail.  If you’ve signed up for the waiting list, you can now start using Tournology for your own nefarious purposes.

Currently, we’re looking for beta testers who fill these niches:

• If you’re a manager of a team or tournament
• If you’re organizing or participating in a Single Elimination or Round Robin tournament
• If you’re excited about trying out new, sweet applications for free.

We’re always on the lookout for new features, bug fixes, or anything else you’re interested in seeing Tournology accomplish.

We’ve got big, big goals for Tournology. Some of the ideas on our A-list:

• Leaderboards. Want to know the top softball players in Texas are this year? We’ll keep track of your history and show you who’s hot.
• Notifications. Easily send participants news about upcoming matches, results, and schedule changes.
• Hassle-free registration and payments. We’re not in the business of trying to upsell you for DVDs and other junk you don’t need.
• Free during the beta. We’re still working out our pricing structure, but beta users will be grandfathered into special accounts as a thanks to helping make Tournology great.

Convinced? Create an account and check us out.

Competitors must complete seven individual crossword puzzle rounds to vie for the final. Each round is scored based on puzzle difficulty, as well as speed and accuracy of the solver’s solution. After the initial seven rounds have been completed, the scores from each round are added up, and the top three members of the top three divisions (organized by skill level) participate in the final eighth puzzle.

See the 2009 ACPT Results

What is interesting, and what should be noted very closely, is the format of the eighth and final round. The puzzle for this round is enlarged onto a white board, placed on an easel, and solvers complete the puzzle in front of a full audience. Each competitor wears earmuffs to block any external noise, for fair competition and to avoid distraction. Live commentary is available for the audience’s viewing pleasure.

When organizing or competing in any tournament, it’s important for all competitors and supporters to watch the final match. It will entertain the audience by showcasing great skill, display healthy competition between the best players, and give everyone something to aspire to for the next tournament. Make sure you take a gander at the finals video of the 2009 ACPT included below. It has all of those things and more.

This is a great example of a well run tournament. Solvers of all skill levels will have fun competing in their division. You needn’t be the best to feel the adrenaline from high intensity competition, and that’s what every tournament organizer should strive to encourage. American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, we salute you. Well done.

With the recent collapse of 3d realms, we’ve decided it’s time to get out of the vaporware business and release our first version of Tournology.

Currently, Tournology is in a private beta. That means you can register on our VIP list, and once there’s a critical mass to run a couple tournaments, we’ll set you loose on the site.  You can start a tournament (we currently support Round Robin and Single Elimination) and create your teams of destiny.

We’re really excited to get Tournology available to as many people as possible. And in accordance with Linus’s Law, there’s likely features we haven’t thought of, or bugs we haven’t tweaked yet. So we’ve added a link at the top of the page for you to send us feedback, both positive and negative.

So be cool like Duke and come get some beta-y goodness. We promise we won’t disappoint.

Deep in the bowels of a small-town financial institution, new life was born. Data Models, ORM classes, View Helpers, and a Round Robin split gave birth to something we never could have expected when we started bootstrapping this web product in April 2007.

It began with a simple description of house rules and kiosk etiquette, and the competitors got down to business: registering their teams, signing up for the tournament, and the games began!

The great thing about Tournology is that it hasn’t been difficult to find excellent testers. We provided a location, a few decks of playing cards, and set up a few computers to access the application, and they were more than happy to go to town.

One of the most important pieces of any test is reviewable evidence. We set up two kiosks for our eight teams to use, and also utilized a simple screen capture program to record our end user’s every move. Their stumbles through our foibles would ultimately provide us with the precious evidence we would use to improve our workflows, streamline our interfaces, to reach our end goal: a great application.

After the first few rounds, the tournament began to run itself.  As teams entered scores, they found their next match, identified their competitors, and sat down at an empty table.

After 13 matches, victors were crowned and the competitors dispersed. But our job is just beginning.  We’ve got enough usability reviews, UI tweaks, and new features to keep us elbows deep in code for a while. We’re looking forward to running the next tournament, it’ll stack up to even more greatness!

PS: Want to take a look at the tournament?

Answering this question proves more difficult with more obscure use cases. For example, consider the microblogging service Twitter. Entirely open ended, it asks the end user to answer another simple question: “What are you doing?” This use case was initially difficult to prove beneficial, but it was the open-ended nature that paved the way for its popularity to snowball. Once end users began to see how the early adopters were using the service, the benefit become more and more apparent.

Or consider DropBox, which uses a very effective demonstration video to go through a few obvious use cases of the product. This serves as a simple way to bridge the divide between an abstract web product and something of value to an end user.

But sometimes, the use case is more obvious. For example, consider our tournament coordination web site Tournology. We aim to provide an easy way for tournament administrators to coordinate tournaments for any game or sport, big or small. We’re doing nothing more than providing a simple and relevant window into a complex flow of information and events relating to a tournament.

But now we must ask the question: “What do you want Tournology to do?”

How do you run your tournaments? What games or sports do you play? What special tournament rules have you established to facilitate fair play and good competition?

And to answer those questions, we’ve set up a simple feedback website using UserVoice. We’ve put a green “Feedback” tab on the right of all of our pages, which you can use to submit an idea. Tell us about your tournament, so that we can better develop Tournology for you. We’re at a crossroads, one where you can play a crucial role in shaping the future of Tournology to fit your needs. A time where you can change “What’s In It For Me?” into “This is what I want.” We welcome your participation.

Of course, the crucial piece of usability testing is reviewable evidence. And that means spying on our tournament participants! We set up two kiosks so that teams could easily access our application, and then used a screen capture program to record their every mouse movement, keyboard key press, and each vocal expletive used when they couldn’t find what they were looking for.

Of course, there are a ton of different screen capture programs out there, and your mileage will vary when using each one. Some are intended for simple demonstration videos, where a presenter might go through a variety of steps one after another in quick succession to display how to accomplish a task. These are generally intended to be shorter videos, and software developed primarily for this use case may not handle the longer recording sessions that a usability test will require.

Here, we’ll go through a few of the programs we tried, and give you a little bit of information on the strengths and weaknesses as they relate to usability testing.

Testing Criteria

1. Must record high resolution videos. We wanted to run our kiosks at the highest resolution the monitor would allow (1920×1200), and then use the page zoom feature of the browser to increase the fonts on the page to a readable size. Ultimately, this would look much better than running a lower resolution on our 24″ kiosk monitors. That means the capture program would need to either record in full 1920×1200, or be smart enough to record the portion of the viewable window needed for the displayed browser content.
2. Must output in a common video format. We ultimately wanted something that would play in a normal video player, like VLC. We certainly did not want the program to use its own proprietary format. Also, the more a codec could compress the output, the better. We don’t need a lossless codec for this task.
3. Must not affect system performance. Sure, any old program can record 1920×1200 resolution, but will the mouse jump in 20px increments?
4. Simultaneous audio recording is a plus, video is even better.
5. Visual indicator of Meta Key Presses and Mouse Clicks. Later on, how will I know that the user hit the CTRL key, or the ALT key, or the Apple key on the keyboard?

Another key factor we faced is that three of the four developers on the project had Apple MacBooks, so it was pretty much guaranteed that we’d be using the MacOS platform for our kiosks. This turned out to be a beneficial requirement, as it would appear that there are quite a few more reputable capture programs for MacOS than Windows, not to mention that the MacBook has a built in web cam (for any possible video recording). If you want to use a MacBook for a usability test with an external monitor, please check out these tips from Christian Cantrell.

Silverback

The coolest feature about Silverback is that it will overlay the video from your web cam right into the screen capture video. While the correlation between mouse movement and eye movement has been extensively studied, we find it infinitely more useful to look at the user’s emotional response. Are they getting frustrated? Angry? Were they delighted at the ease of use of a particular feature?

Unfortunately, in our tests, Silverback is not yet stable when trying to export videos longer than 30 minutes. It is a problem they are actively working on, and I hope they successfully solve it soon, because this is a very valuable feature.

CamStudio

One of the best features in CamStudio is that they let you choose which codec you want to encode the resulting video in. So, naturally, I tried the XVID codec and it worked just fine. CamStudio also has an option to export to SWF (Flash).

IShowU

In the IShowU feature set, one of the interesting pieces is that IShowU HD and HD Pro work with full screen OpenGL applications. This is an important note to consider if you’re testing the usability of something 3-dimensionally accelerated.

Big Hitters We Didn’t Review

Final Decision

Ultimately, we decided to go with ScreenFlick. It handled full 1920×1200 without a noticeable drop in system performance, and resulted in very manageable file sizes. The program displays a nice video size counter in the taskbar, which only increments when something on the screen changes. Very efficient recording. Also, for a demo, the watermark it added to the resulting video wasn’t too obtrusive to use for our purposes, especially compared to the very intrusive IShowU demo watermark. It would have been really nice to get web cam video integrated with our usability test, and it looks like a purchased version of IShowU would be a very viable alternative which we’ll have to consider when we have our next Tournology tournament.

Yahoo introduced Graded Browser Support, which states that clients using A-grade browsers will have the optimal experience, and clients graded lower may have a reduced feature set or decreased performance. The most important thing to take away from this approach is that with older C-grade and non-mainstream X-grade browsers, the core features are still functional.

We’re in an interesting time in web development, browsers are again releasing new features prior to official standardization, in the hopes of guiding the standards to a more practical implementation based on real development and use cases, not just hypothetical design. As many have stated, The Browser Wars are back.

Tournology has decided to both endorse and utilize the popular open source PHP application framework developed by Zend, aptly titled Zend Framework. One of the devices Zend Framework (or, ZF) uses to increase the reusability of code in the View portion of the framework is the concept of a View Helper, a simple class and method pair that returns HTML markup (or equivalent content suitable for output) to the View.

The following is a Zend Framework View Helper to parse the user agent string, a simple port of the user agent parsing code currently residing in the popular jQuery JavaScript framework. This can be used in a variety of ways, from serving user agent specific content to adding a browser specific CSS class to avoid relying on CSS hacks.

Download

• Browser.php: User Agent Parsing Class (port of jQuery 1.2.6 navigator.userAgent parsing)
• BrowserHelper.php: Zend Framework View Helper

Please consult the Zend_View_Helper documentation for information on how to integrate the View Helper into your application. Also, set up your autoloader correctly to load the Browser class (and your Zend Framework files), or add the require() declaration at the top of BrowserHelper.php to load the Browser class. You may then commence to use the view helper like so:

From your view script:

<?php echo $this->browserHelper()->getVendorClassName(); ?>
<?php if($this->browserHelper()->is(Browser::MSIE)) { /* do something */ }; ?>


Or from your controller:

<?php echo $this->view->browserHelper()->getVendorClassName(); ?>
<?php if($this->view->browserHelper()->is(Browser::MOZILLA)) { /* do something */ }; ?>


One specific application in Tournology using this approach is with rounded corners. You’ll notice in the source code of the popular microblogging website Twitter, they enhance the presentation for browsers that have proprietary CSS extensions for the CSS 3 border-radius property. For instance, as of the time of this writing, the td#content tag has the following properties to provide rounded corners to browsers using the Gecko and Webkit rendering engines (Firefox, Mozilla, Flock, Safari, and Chrome):


-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 5px;
-webkit-border-top-left-radius: 5px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft:5px;
-moz-border-radius-topleft:5px;


However, Twitter does not provide any mechanism for rounded corners in Internet Explorer. What we aim to do is establish the baseline presentation: rounded corners using background images and nested divs by default, and then alter the markup returned for Gecko and Webkit compatible browsers to a single div with no background images needed. This will reduce the amount of markup and HTTP requests, thus improving load times further in newer web browsers that support these proprietary property shims for CSS 3 border-radius. This is an approach that goes beyond the Graded Browser Support guidelines set forth by Yahoo to enhance the experience even further as a reward to clients using the newest browser versions. We like to call it A+ Grade Browsers, giving extra credit (in the form of increased performance) to the browsers that have the highest marks (in terms of advanced feature support).

We must mention that establishing a presentation baseline is the most important step, as parsing the User Agent may not be reliable in all cases, especially in corporate or educational environments using proxy caching as a means of serving content.

Stay tuned for another article detailing the source code used to provide fully compliant A-grade Rounded Corners, which are automatically enhanced to High Performance Rounded Corners in A+ grade browsers.

Seth Godin is thinking like a Tournologist with his latest blog post that really gets us thinking about how the debate format can be changed in order to provide a more informative and fair discussion for the benefit of the viewers, not just the politicians involved.