Like many institutions, we put numbers for our various online presences in our annual report and other presentations: YouTube views, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. For most services, this is very easy to do: log in, go to the stats page, write the big number down. We also want to include the iTunes U numbers, but for iTunes U, there is no centralized stats reporting outside of the Microsoft Excel file Apple sends iTunes U administrators every week. Tabulating the stats by hand would be time consuming and error-prone, so I wrote a short python script to automate it. Here is is:

[python]
#!/usr/bin/env python
# encoding: utf-8
"""
itunesUstats.py
Created by Justin Heideman on 2010-05-19.
"""

import sys, os, glob, xlrd

def main():
#change this to the path where your stats are
path = ‘itunes_U_stats/all/’
totalDownloads = 0

for infile in glob.glob( os.path.join(path, ‘*.xls’) ):
# open the file
wb = xlrd.open_workbook(infile)

# get the most recent days’s tracks
sh = wb.sheet_by_index(1)

# get the downloads from that day
downloads = sh.col_values(1)

#first entry is u’Count’, whcih we don’t want
downloads.pop(0)

#sum it up
totalDownloads += sum(downloads)

# show a little progress
print sum(downloads)

#done, output results
print "—————————————————-"
print "Total downloads: %d" % totalDownloads

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
main()
[/python]

This script uses the excellent xlrd python module to read the Excel files (simple xlrd tutorial here), which is roughly 27.314 times easier than trying to use an Excel macro to do the same thing. To use this, simply change the path on line 13 to a directory containing all your iTunes stats files, and run the script from the command line. You’ll get output like this:

929.0
732.0
779.0
854.0
1000.0
987.0
765.0
812.0
1275.0
1333.0
1114.0
1581.0
1278.0
1568.0
1854.0
2102.0
1108.0
1078.0
----------------------------------------------------
Total downloads: 21149

Do note that the script is tied to the excel format Apple has been using, so if they change it, this will break. Apple explains the iTunes report fields here. This script tells you ” all the iTunes U tracks users downloaded that week through the DownloadTrack, DownloadTracks, and SubscriptionEnclosure actions”.

A few years ago I was trying to explain the concept of “fail early, fail often” to someone, and failing.  (see what I did there?  ;-)  They didn’t understand why you just wouldn’t take longer to build it right the first time.

Now that we’re deep in the process of redesigning our website, I am starting to see the real danger in that sort of thinking.  Despite all our best intentions, we’ve fallen into a trap of thrashing back and forth around certain ideas – unable to agree, unwilling to move forward until we “solve it”, and essentially stuck in the same cycle illustrated in this cartoon.

Click for the whole cartoon (scroll down a bit)

To try to help break the recent impasse on site navigation, we’re doing some simple user testing using paper prototypes of several ideas.  These are meant to be rough sketches to essentially pass/fail the “do they get it?” test, but they’re also giving us a ton of valuable little hints into how people see and understand both our website and our navigation.

An example of some paper prototypes for the navigation. (Don't worry, it's just a rough idea and one of many!)

Our basic process so far is to ask people (non-staff) for first impressions of the top nav: does it make sense?  Do they think they know what they’ll get under each button?  Then we show the flyouts and see if it’s what they expected.  Anything missing?  Anything doesn’t meet their expectations?  Finally we ask a few targeted “task” questions, like “where would you look if you wanted information about n work of art you saw in the galleries?”

Even this simple round of testing has revealed some clearly wrong assumptions on our part.  By fixing these things now (failing early) and iterating quickly, we can do more prototypes and get more feedback (failing often).  I’ll try to post updates as we proceed.

PS — Anyone else doing paper prototypes like this?  I think we all know we’re “supposed” to do quick user testing, but honestly this is the first time in years we’ve actually done something like it.