Blogger is a web application that allows users to create and edit entries in an online journal or “weblog”. From user research, we observed that one of the strongest pain-points in blogger was outside of the system itself. Even iPhoto, commonly seen as an usable image editing software, used before importing images into blogger was difficult to use because of a number of shortcomings, like cropping and resizing images. Recognizing this, we changed our design focus, from one of improving blogger, to one of creating a new interface, to support integrating the common image editing actions needed for posting images into blogger.

With the results of this comprehensive Contextual Inquiry, we developed various models according to Beyer and Holzblatt’s method of Contextual Design. The objective was to learn about how people use the current version of the online blogger web application, and how usable innovations can be produced out of observing these work habits.

A variety of usability tests were performed on the resulting conceptual design: Heuristic Evaluation demonstrated that we had found a cheap and efficient path to usability, Cognitive Walkthrough showed that we had improved the system’s walk-up-and-use, and KLM and GOMS exposed how efficient the user’s actions are when using the interface.