{"id":1892,"date":"2012-12-12T11:18:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-12T16:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/?p=1892"},"modified":"2017-04-28T08:26:25","modified_gmt":"2017-04-28T12:26:25","slug":"how-trendy-saved-my-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/community\/2012\/12\/12\/how-trendy-saved-my-life\/","title":{"rendered":"How Trendy Saved My Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, it didn\u2019t really<\/em> save my life. But Trendy\u2019s<\/a> users have helped me understand MATLAB coding and plotting\u2026 and to some, that\u2019s right up there with having their lives saved.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m Rob Nickerson, a Senior Usability Specialist at MathWorks, and I worked on web applications on mathworks.com like the webstore, training<\/a>, and careers <\/a>areas. However, Trendy is a slightly different animal; users of Trendy write small snippets of MATLAB code to gather data, and then Trendy automatically gathers and plots that data indefinitely. \u00a0When I was approached to work on the first release of Trendy, I was excited (and intimidated, to be honest) by the challenge of working on a web application so closely tied to MATLAB. Did I need to be a MATLAB coding expert? Did I need to know how to use hold on\/hold off, or how to write complex HTML scraping code in MATLAB?<\/p>\n

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From the world of the obscure: My plot for the sales rank for "Overboard" on Amazon after being mentioned on the Oscars.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

Thankfully, the answer to those questions was \u201cnot really\u201d. The important part of my job is to not be an expert user myself, but rather to identify who the real users are, and what it is they want to do. In the past two years we\u2019ve recruited MATLAB Central users like you to come to MathWorks and evaluate Trendy using paper mockups, development builds, and production releases. The feedback from those usability sessions directly influences the features and functionality we incorporate into Trendy, whether it\u2019s during a major release or minor tune-up releases.\u00a0 For example, user testing told us that being able to collect a data point once a day was limiting, and you gave us examples like “I want to collect my fantasy football stats weekly”, or “I want to track a stock price over the course of a day”. With that feedback in mind, we now allow data samples to occur hourly, daily, weekly, or even monthly.<\/p>\n

This process of gathering and distilling user feedback has not only educated me about our users and their needs, but also about MATLAB and plotting in general. We now have lots of great content to learn from, as our users have made some pretty\u00a0incredible things\u00a0in the short time it\u2019s been available, constantly changing the answer to the question “What can I use Trendy for?”:<\/p>\n