Usability and Load Testing underway this week: feedback coming in all the time
All of our usability testing slots have been filled following an unprecedented bunfight across campus for the choice of £5 cashback or book tokens on offer. The testing takes place on Wednesday afternoon (16th June) and Thursday morning (17th June). Each tester has 20 minutes to complete a series of short exercises, and will be observed by two people recording the pathways and clicks they take to get to an answer, as well as comments, observations, and preferences.
Client and server side testing is taking place throughout the afternoon of Monday 14th June. We hope this will expose any frailties with the service when pressured under different conditions.
Feedback is coming in all the time from users via the online feedback form, printed feedback forms, and user feedback workshops. Several issues have been highlighted which need to be addressed as part of the development and reskinning phases of the project. Limitations of VuFind have also been brought to our attention (e.g. specifically the lack of a true index browsing search). However, the search interface offers different solutions to locating content. Responses have been very positive – particularly from the student body, with support for functionality such as tagging already evident.
Watch out for further mini surveys on specific KEVEN features as the project progresses.
Tags: inf11, jisc, jiscLMS, User testing, users, vufindkeven
June 14th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Good luck with your testing, I would be interested to learn more about the format of tests and of course some of the findings you receive in due course. We are about to do our own guerrilla usability testing on Wednesday 15th for UX2 and are currently recruiting participants for persona interviews as part of the AquabrowserUX project. It appears that we have lots of similar activities going on and possible opportunities to share resources where needed.
The UX2 and AquabrowserUX project wiki has links to many useful resources and can be found here: https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/UX2/AquaBrowserUX
Feedback is always welcome on our associate blogs too
Report comment
June 14th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
Thankyou for getting in touch. Yes it seems we are following parallel paths. There’s quite a lot of synergy between these JISC projects as we are also looking at what Chris Keene is working on at Sussex with an eye to its application here too. I am very happy to share what we have with you. Our approach may be a bit rough and ready as I am new to all this – although we have expertise elsewhere in the department that I am drawing on.
We beguiled starving students with the offer of £5 cashback on their University cards, or a £5 book token. There were some creative comments as to what £5 can strecth to (“it will feed me for a day in the College cafeteria”, “£5 is 1 / 79th of the cost of a pair of Jimmy Choo heels”, “I can get 78% of a packet of silk cut with £5″, and “25 throws at a fairground hoopla”). All good stuff. We were inundated by requests. Those with reflexes sharpened by hunger or greed got the allotted testing slots on a 1st come 1st served basis. Plan B (which we still might have to resort to if people don’t turn up for their test slot) is to lasso some free range students in the building on the day.
I haven’t really done any persona interviews or user case studies, or specifically tried to identify different user communities. I’m relying, rather lackadaisically, on the variety of students and staff we have here, and their proactive engagement with the Library catalogue (this is phase 2 of an earlier iteration, which already had a lot of community inviolvement), in order to throw up issues arising from variations. Happily, we have by chance, an even split of M & F, with a mixture of staff, researchers, pgs and UGs, as well as pot purri of backgrounds (age differences, overseas students, dysexia, etc.) signed up to our testing.
The tests are work through sheets ( we have 2 different ones) testing different searching scenarios. Each test will take a bout 20 minutes and be observed by two testers who record the process, pathways, comments and outcomes. I did consider using a formal tool like Morae, but time and resources were too short to buy install, and learn how to use it. We are trying not to test their knowledge of how to dissect a reference or use the Library, so we’ve given quite a lot of thought to the wording. We are also at this stage, only testing the core functionality of the catalogue. Feedback about addiitonal (popular) functionality such as the tagging, is coming in all the time as part of the feedback colection proces (online and paper forms, workshops, etc.). We are going to run some mini (surveymonkey / poll daddy) popularity polls to capture more data about such features.
At the later “reskinning” phase of the project, we’ll be doing further usability testing (card cut-out exercises) for the screen designs. This week, we are alos running client and server side tests to check the robustness of the catalogue under different circumstances. These are following guidelines that come from our Web Development team, and which I can share with you if they will be helfpful.
Report comment