Hi everyone,
Just reading through "Report from formal Drupal usability testing at the University of Minnesota Libraries" and pulled this quote on current needs - -
"We want to see this happening more. The first goal is to measure the user experience, and not guess about it. One of the ways we can measure it is with usability testing, but we need labs and people to observe, facilitators to run the lab, and then interviewers to debrief the evaluators, and then resources to get everyone to the lab." (I think from Bevan Rudge)
I'm a student in the University of Baltimore's Interaction Design and Information Architecture masters program, and about to embark on my first Usability Testing project using the eye tracking equipment we have on campus. I recently met Kent Bye, who introduced me to Drupal and the usability testing at UMN. I would like to make Drupal the subject of my team's work.
Two issues:
We only have a month to pull off the initial project. Once our semester ends, it's a possibility to take the testing further with more users, but at this time we're limited to a small sample (4 - 5 users per group, probably two groups).
No one on my team has any Drupal experience! At least not yet.
So my first question to this community - - do you think it's best to work with a similar persona and set of scenarios as the UMN study, or would a focus on a different type of user be more helpful at this time? (the "content contributer" persona/scenario seems a bit simpler recruiting-wise, however we do not have access to a Drupal site to use)
Any input would be most appreciated, especially from anyone involved in the UMN study. thanks!
Comments
Immediate lessons learned, test HEAD
Hi, there were immediate lessons learned from the UoM testing we could improve on. So it's worth testing again just to implement those improvements. Also, we should plan to test HEAD, instead of Drupal 6 so we can report back to the Drupal core developers whether or not we are making progress. That would give us a usability target we could aspire to, over the next month.
Please contact me and let's talk on the phone.
Cheers,
Kieran
Drupal community adventure guide, Acquia Inc.
Drupal events, Drupal.org redesign
sounds good
Thanks Kieran, send your number to beccascollan@gmail and I'll get in touch.
focus on "admin" interfaces
One thing we decided in moving towards the work at UMN is that the "Admin" interfaces are the most important ones to improve. Most sites are themed for "content contributors", so testing of those screens will be less broadly applicable than testing of the admin interfaces. The "node/add/*" screens are still valuable, but adding comments isn't as valuable, for example.
One problem with Kieran's comment to focus on HEAD is that you can't duplicate the tests of CCK in HEAD. So if you want to duplicate this work you'll need to focus on some different areas and/or modify the tests to exclude adding fields.
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great!
The changes in CCK fields would be good to test, but I also think they were less fundamental than some of the other issues (like getting there in the first place).
Some things have already changed since UMN, or are likely to change within the next month:
'story' has changed to 'article' (done)
/admin/content/type moving to /admin/build/type (patch needs review)
Descriptions on permissions page (done)
etc. etc.
It'd be great to test creating new content types and adding content again since that's so fundamental, even if the fields part is left out.
Some stuff we didn't get to cover at UMN but might be interesting:
* menu module - both within node/add and the admin interface - there's a task for this but no-one got to it :)
* book module, taxonomy and forums (drag and drop, hierarchy, stuff like that).
* content administration - front page, sticky, published/unpublished/mass-updating
An Update
I just talked with Becca, and I'm going to give them an intro to Drupal presentation this week since these are usability students who really haven't used Drupal before and know very little about it. I'm hoping to get them up to speed enough so that they could do some worthwhile testing with a Drupal install.
So it's a deadline-driven timeline where they are doing this as a school project, and their initial thought is to completely replicate the scenario that was done at UMN. I advised against this since it makes sense to me to explore new ground, and there were streamlining improvements that certainly could be made. Like starting off with an easy-win type of task and not one that hangs them up for 30 minutes.
So I started this wiki page here where we can flesh out a reasonable user scenario that they could run and provide back some worthwhile info. Please help flesh out some of the admin tasks that weren't done in Minnesota so that they can either be done by this group or another group that gains access to some lab time. Thanks!
Great to see this more
Great to see this more testing happening so soon! I agree it is of significantly more value to drupal to test DIFFERENT UIs, tasks scenarios and audiences to those tested in UMN.
Kent and Becca,
Reports on Drupal's UI from the Usability students at the school (Being Drupal newbies), would be at least as valuable as reports from formal usability testing. How can we maximize the capturing of such feedback?
I'm also available to help out with advice on this. PM me as I'm not on gdo often these days.
Bevan/
Bevan/
Happy to Help
I'm also happy to help out on this (even if it's just to review docs, etc.)
I have usability experience, IA experience, and some experience in using drupal.
Feel free to email me directly (rakanowicz at gmail) or IM (rakanowicz)
Ron
Time for a conference call?
London, Argentina, Baltimore, San Francisco, New Zealand.
Can we do a call?
Kieran
Drupal community adventure guide, Acquia Inc.
Drupal events, Drupal.org redesign