As the members of the “Usability” group, we all know that resources to conduct usability studies are limited. For getting more data and conducting more studies, I am thinking we could collaborate with Bentley University, Massachussetts, USA for a usability study.
Details:
Bentley University is one of best schools in the country for usability research (The program is ‘Human Factors in Information Design’ www.bentley.edu/ms/hfid ). The program is intense and well respected. As a part of the curriculum, in one of the courses HF 750 (Fall), the students learn to conduct usability studies. We could have a group of students work on Drupal project. I thought this would be a symbiotic opportunity for us to leverage each other’s objectives. We need data, they need cool projects.
Pros:
• Students use Bentley usability lab for free (which is awesome) with all the one way mirror jazz http://usability.bentley.edu/
• With proper guidance from us and the instructor (Gregg Almquist), we could have a solid study
• The students do the study, analyze and report the findings
• Probably, a good potential to involve budding UX professionals
Cons:
• We will have to guide them with what should be tested (time commitment)
• We may have to compensate the participants (May be, we can find a sponsor)
I haven’t thought about what we should test, but there are so many things under the sun, I am sure we will have something concrete to test.
Thoughts?
P.S.: I am an alumni of the program and do not have any ulterior motives behind this.
Comments
Great Idea!
I think this is a great idea. As a college student myself, its great to get to work on actual systems that will be deployed in large scale, since its rare for these types of opportunities. Additionally, students will get to see their findings influence a large, open-source software project and witness the process.
Go Dharmesh!
A quick initial idea would be
A quick initial idea would be to do some testing in the area of creating navigation, building menus. We could test regular menu item creation, book module and potentially compare basic core functionality to contrib solutions like menu block (http://drupal.org/project/menu_block).
Compensating Participants
If you need to compensate the participants, send me a budget, and I'll pitch it to my partners at DesignHammer.
David Minton, Managing Partner, DesignHammer | Durham, NC, USA
Super!
Good to see the enthusiasm and support :)
David: That is fantastic news. Thank you, David! I will keep you posted on how this proceeds. I emailed the Director of the program to see if this would be possible. Keeping my fingers crossed :)
Dharmesh Mistry
UX Researcher | Acquia,Inc.