A blog series telling tales from around Specac. This week we hear from our Application Scientist, Dr. Andrew Davies, who has been assisting our Engineers in the development of our next exciting product.
I’m the application scientist at Specac, and this week I’ve been asked to help test out one of our prototype products to ensure the software for it works correctly. We’re not quite ready to announce exactly what that product is yet, but rest assured it is being tested as vigorously as all Specac products to ensure you get that great quality you’ve come to expect and will hopefully launch later this year.
To date I’ve not really been involved in this project so I’m a good person with no prior knowledge to start pushing buttons and see what happens. The first thing I noticed was the date and time was not set up yet. It was easy enough to find the menu option, but it was frustrating to input the year as I had to press the input button 52 times to get the date from 1970 up to today. There’s no way Specac would release a product with this level of frustration straight out of the box, but then it is only the first version of the software with plenty of bugs for me to find, identify and then our software engineers to eradicate. We’ll be setting a default date, and maybe having something a bit simpler than a +/- button for the date. Also for our friends across the pond in America I noted down that the only date option at the moment is the British day-month-year. We’ll have to get that option added.
Some of the icons are a bit confusing to me, so I think we’ll need to go back to our graphic designer and have them redesign them to be more intuitive. After an hour I have 3 pages of notes to feed back to our engineering team. Nothing major, a few things that don’t quite work correctly, mostly things that our end users would find frustrating so we need to fix. Overall the product already meets most of our marketing departments requirements. As ever our engineering team have done a fantastic job and made a product that looks really good. Functionally its already there, the user experience just needs work.
Next week our engineers will begin cycle testing it to ensure that it lasts. I know from experience that Specac products LAST. In my PhD we had accessories from 20 years ago, and just this week I had a customer enquire about whether we still made parts for an electrical item we sold them in 1998! Maybe in 25 years time a customer will be asking if we still make parts for this as yet unreleased product that they bought in 2022.
I hope that gives you a flavour of what I get up to at Specac. This month I’ll be attending SPEC2022, if you’re attending I’ll see you there.
Andrew
Can you tell what it is yet?
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