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)
And here’s what I learnt:
Positive
- 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.
- He liked the idea of taking a quiz about a subject.
- He noticed all the [edit] buttons along the right-hand side of the page and wasn’t afraid to click on them.
Negative
- He didn’t notice the tabs at the top of the page, so I had to point them out.
- 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!)
- 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
- He said he would want to print the page, and clicked on the “printable version” link.
- He thought that the assignment due dates calendar wasn’t necessary because myUnisa has this info.
- 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!
