Conducting usability study at D4DBoston 2011

As most of you are aware that we completed a successful round of usability testing with 8 participants new to Drupal at the University of Minnesota in May 2011. Yayy! Thank YOU everyone involved in making this work. I was pleased to see the attention this study is getting on the issue queue (tagged with “UMN 2011”) and at various conferences including DCL. But this is just uncovering the tip of the iceberg, a lot more needs to be tested and be reported to the community. As a part of this, I plan to explore various avenues to conduct more studies. Drupal Camps and Cons are a fitting place to leverage this. So, to move this initiative forward, I will be conducting short 15-minute usability study at D4DBoston (Design 4 Drupal: http://boston2011.design4drupal.org/) this weekend (June 25, 26) at MIT.

More on the study:
• 15 minute usability study with 6-10 participants
• The study will ask the participants to add attachment to their existing content type. I chose content types because:
-It is SUCH an important feature of core
-It is often considered as an “advanced” feature which I do not agree to
-I want the answer to “Can a beginner understand content types in 15 minutes?”
The goal of the study is to understand if users understand the concept, can they complete the task?, what are the problems they encounter? How strongly they feel about the problems they encounter?
• The demographics for the study: Users who have some idea/experience about Drupal but have not used content types
• Acquia has graciously offered to provide compensation to the users for their participation and comments (Sweet!)
• I will try to get the recordings of the session but cannot guarantee at this stage considering the conference settings (and the noise)
• Jacob Singh (from Acquia) is conducting training for “New to Drupal” users at the conference and he will be touching upon content types. I am strongly considering to sending a short survey to these training participants about their experience with content types. It would be interesting (I get excited! Such a nerd!) to slice the survey data to my study and track how user experience differs (if it differs) with or without training.

I will update you guys with the study and findings. Thoughts?