Archive for June, 2009

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Exam timetable for each page

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

I finally found a MediaWiki calendar extension that does the job! Here is what the calendar looks like.

calendar

And it’s easily editable because you don’t have to mess with table syntax. All you do is type the date. e.g. 2009-10-13:::ALP101Q Exam

The purpose of this?

Well, if someone fills in the exam date for a module, I’ll know when to email everyone doing that module. Not really a ‘good luck for the exam’ email, but rather a request to come back to the wiki straight after the exam and put down all the questions you remember were asked.

Some improvements to be made:

  1. I think the current year needs to be displayed at the top, next to the month. (Will have to modify the extension’s code for this)
  2. It needs a proper design, maybe even the exam date highlighted. (Will need to look into the CSS)

Tags:
Posted in Unisa Past Papers | No Comments »

I meet a future tester

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

Today I met my new neighbour who, it turns out, I had bumped into in 2004 at the post office where she was sending off a Unisa assignment!

We actually recognised each other, even though we’d only met once 5 years ago. I remember how it happened: She was posting a Unisa assignment, I approached her and told her she could submit them electronically (which she didn’t know), and I showed her how to log on to SOL (Students On Line it was called in those days, not myUnisa!) and of course I also told her about my Unisa website (called COSINE, not WikiStudent, in those days).

So, the upshot is, she’s agreed to do some usability testing for me :-)  She’s already graduated, but her input will still be valuable because I need testers who know how Unisa works and what students want.

Posted in Testing | No Comments »

Introducing “community”

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Since the initial testing revealed (from two sources) that students want to interact with other students doing a module, I dug around and found this very suitable ContributionCredits extension. This is what it produces at the bottom of every wiki page:

Contribution Credits

The above snippet was taken from the ENN102E page. You see a heading “Contributors to this page” with usernames of everyone who ever edited that page (except for admin).

So that’s a neat solution for indicating who is taking which modules. You can also click on a person’s username to find out more about them (what they are currently studying, what work they’re doing on the wiki, view their photo…).

In the past, I had a section where you could insert your name if you were doing a particular module, but that was a manual process, so not many people went to the effort. This extension is ideal because your username is added automatically the moment you save your changes to a page.

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Tester # 1 views a module page

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

I love this tester - he’s very talkative and “thinks out loud” when looking at the pages I show him, which is exactly why I’m doing this “live” user testing. You learn some things that you don’t learn by emailing someone and asking for feedback electronically.

Here’s the page he looked at (COS340A)

 

COS 340-A

And here’s what I learnt:

Positive

  1. He understood the picture of the teapot graphic (i.e. that it was related to the subject COS340A), even though he is studying languages, not computer graphics.
  2. He liked the idea of taking a quiz about a subject.
  3. He noticed all the [edit] buttons along the right-hand side of the page and wasn’t afraid to click on them.

Negative

  1. He didn’t notice the tabs at the top of the page, so I had to point them out.
  2. He thought the “discussion” tab was where you could e.g. complain about the lecturers. (It’s actually where you discuss the content and layout of the page, not a discussion forum!)
  3. I asked him to try sell a textbook and he had no clue how to insert his name and book into a table. The wiki markup for tables with all those pipe symbols (||) is not intuitive!

Surprises

  1. He said he would want to print the page, and clicked on the “printable version” link.
  2. He thought that the assignment due dates calendar wasn’t necessary because myUnisa has this info.
  3. He said “where are the other students?”. He wanted to see names on the page, of other people taking the course.

So, I’m off to make some changes to the layout of Unisa module pages…

To quote from page 134 of Don’t make me think:

Testing one user is 100 percent better than testing none. Testing always works, and even the worst test with the wrong user will show you important things you can do to improve your site.

Very true!

Posted in Testing, Unisa Modules | No Comments »

Site Search Analytics

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

I’m only on page 88 of my Advanced Web metrics with Google Analytics book. (Still over 250 pages to go). Here’s an interesting quote from page 84:

Site Search Usage

The Site Search reports contained in the Content section of Google Analytics are dedicated to understanding the usage of your internal search engine (if you have one). For large, complex websites with thousands, and in some case hundreds of thousands, of product pages, having an internal site search engine is critical for a successful visitor experience - no navigational system can perform as well as a good internal search engine in these cases.

At the very least, site search reports are a form of market research - every time visitors enter a keyword into your search box, they are telling you exactly what they want to find on your website. Marketers can use this information to better target campaigns. Product managers can use this as a feedback mechanism for designing new features or adding new products.

A report on the search terms used by visitors on your website is clearly powerful information for your organization. However, understanding where on your website a visitor reaches for the search box, what page they go to following a search, how long they stay on your site after conducting a search, whether they perform further search refinements, whether they are more likely to make a conversion, and whether their average order value is higher are also vital clues that can help you optimize the visitor experience.

Good points. I’m in fact using this blog’s search box to do this very analysis, though I can see one can get much more information by using GA and Google’s internal search engine. Fortunately there is a MediaWiki extension for this, which should be quick to implement. I’m so busy with testing right now that I haven’t yet had a chance!

Posted in Navigation | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »