The birthing.
library.mcmaster.ca finally launched. Birthings are never easy, or so I hear. This one was no different. Of course, I'm pleased as punch with our bouncing baby girl (or boy? Maybe gender-neutral). Heck, this is the culmination of four months of full-time work for me.
As my Boss, A E-J, mentioned on twitter, one of the best parts of the unveiling is getting the unfiltered feedback from the community. There's a little feedback widget that floats on every page, and users can submit their feelings directly from that page. Without quoting directly, feedback tends to veer towards the 'angry' end of the spectrum when users find that their tried-and-true methods of doing things don't work anymore. They say stuff like 'awful', 'this sucks', and 'the feedback widget is all over the screen and is annoying'. My favourite is the person that told us that he ran the website through an HTML validator, and it showed all kinds of errors. Now that's my kind of user! Every feedback message means a lot to us, though.
Truth is, the website still needs a lot of work, and is essentially useless in IE6 (damn you, IE!!). We're working on it, and we promise to do some useability testing too.
I totally laughed when I saw your post title. I mentioned to someone the other day (minutes before the launch) that I'd been feeling like an expectant mother for a few weeks. It seemed really painful at the time, but I've definitely heard of worse. And, in retrospect, it wasn't all that bad! I would definitely do it again. Although not anytime soon.
