Throughout the sunny (and at times unusually hot) Portland summer, the Revelation Design Department has been carrying out another round of customer research. We have conducted interviews with a substantial sampling of researchers and moderators, investigating the workflows and processes associated with day-to-day moderation. Our first research session was conducted over-the-phone using screen sharing, which allows us to virtually observe the researchers' interaction with Revelation, using real data from recently completed projects.

Even though the research validated a few of our suspicions, it also revealed several new findings and ideas. Here's a few highlights:

• Through observation we watched moderators navigate the process of understanding what's new in a project and saw some interesting ways researchers were going about this. We can save a few clicks and a lot of cumulative time by optimizing this interaction and making it a bit more directed.
• Moderation interfaces need to be mindful of context and allow the moderator to quickly flip perspective between an Activity-centric and Participant-centric views.
• Computers are great at counting and remembering - any interaction we can design to automate the times that humans have to physically (or mentally) count is a big win for usability. This showed up a lot in completion management scenarios.

We've synthesized this research into a few objectives that will add a lot of value to the software. The Design Department has already begun iterating on these ideas and will be presenting a collection of concepts in a research project conducted through Revelation later on this month. If you'd like to get involved, please send us an email to info@revelationglobal.com with 'Research Project' in the subject line. It'll be real quick (honest!) and we're donating $5 to kiva per participant.