Graduate component

Overview

Graduate students are required to complete an additional assignment for this course. Graduate students will conduct a usability study on the mobile version of their group's site following completion of the second draft of the site. The assignment will recommend improvements to the site, but it is not required that those changes are made. Passing this assignment is required for graduate students to pass the class.

Due Date

5 p.m. Friday, May 6

Steps to Take

This assignment is similar to the usability assignment you completed earlier in the semester. But this time, you will be testing the usability of the mobile version of your group's site. This study should be completed when the second draft of your group's site is complete. You'll use the live web address from GitHub pages.

Make a list of reasons people would visit that site on their own, then break those down into three tasks your participants will attempt to complete. Write scenarios around those tasks that you'll print out and hand to the participant.

Recruit three participants. They can be students/friends, but not people from this class. Do the test in a place they feel comfortable, preferably on their own mobile device.

I suggest you make an audio recording of the tests. It allows you to focus on observing the process and keeping the test moving, without being concerned that you'll miss something. But if you have faith in your note-taking skills and multitasking and want to wing it, that's fine.

First, get the participants talking.

Find out participants' age and job. Have them describe to you their Internet usage — what they mostly do online, and how many hours per day or week they typically spend. Make sure they understand there aren't right or wrong answers, and that they're doing you (and the site) a favor. Then show them the home page and ask them to tell you what they think the purpose of the site is, what they'd likely click on and why, if anything confuses them, etc. They're not clicking at this point, just looking around and thinking out loud. Use your interview skills to stay neutral, not guiding their answers or experience.

Then, give them the three tasks to do. Hand them the scenario you typed up. Each task should take at least a few steps (not just a one-click answer). Record where they seem to get confused, how long the task takes them, what observations they have along the way. Avoid having them use the search option.

After they're done with the tasks, go through your notes and see if anything needs followup.

Turn this in

Note: The completed version of this file is what you'll turn in. As you go through the steps below, you'll see that there's a spot for almost everything in that file. So fill that out and you're ok.

Your tasks/scenarios: The same for each participant.

Completed Usability Report Summary form.

This includes:

Demographic info: gender, age, profession, average time per week using the Internet and most common tasks performed online. The operating system and browser, including versions, used for the test.

Observations from your notes: home page observations, task one, task two, etc. Include the time it took to complete each task, and any issues that came up.

A synthesis of the three tests, describing the top three to five problems you'd recommend as needing attention, based on the three sessions. Address how these problems could be fixed.

A report to the other members of your group written conversationally and in a way that will not provoke defensiveness. Summarize what you asked users to do and what you found. Use screenshots to illustrate your points. Ideally, you and your group would address the issues for the final version, but this project is not dependent on changes being made to your site.

tl;dr:

Graduate students: Use the mobile version of the second draft of your site, write some tests, test with three users, fill out the usability test form, turn it in.