Usability Testing

On Thursday I had the fantastic opportunity to facilitate a set of usability tests on a new learning portal. The day was very fruitful for the organisation as it threw up many different issues we hadn't considered or had but didn't have any evidence to back up our claims.


Methodology


The testing would use eye tracking software to record the users (learners) interaction however the reporting side does not work with flash and this reduced our reliance on this slightly as we had a list of questions we had prepared before hand to facilitate the session.


What were we testing?


The learning portal was a website full of resources designed for learners who after completing it would have received a detailed introduction to a particular employment sector.


Target Audience


The target audience of the portal is predominantly going to be 16 - 24 NEETs who are trying to get a job.With this in mind the portal was designed very closely with the look of  social media websites. I think this affordance made it easier to understand for them but some of the images weren't clicked on on the home page as they thought they were banners not links to resources.


Information Structure


One of the important things to note about this portal is that it is unlike other learning that the organisation has commissioned to be designed in the past. Usually the courses are traditional linear e-learning materials with the portal the non linear approach has been taken deliberately to encourage learners to dip in and out of it. it encourages them that there isn't a single pathway through it.


I wanted to draw this out of the tester to see if they wanted to follow a particular direction and luckily they all didn't. I say luckily because the all understood the structure and could find there way around.


Use of imagery


The images used in the portal were primarily for decoration and they were relevant to the topic, the iconography on the other hand was bespoke and some of the testers didn't understand the correlation between the iconography and the navigation (to be fair I didn't get some of it).


Use of language


The language of the site was aimed at Level 1 learners but how the words were used to describe sections of topic headings was identified by the testers as being unclear. For example My Journey is an introduction and the testers thought it was a learning log, but there was already another button for learning log.


What did I learn from it for the course?


For me the day was really helpful in understanding the importance of usability, really simple things like an x button to close something down was found to be not intuitive and grey text on a white background meant that 8 out of 9 testers missed the visual aid explaining whether they had accessed a particular resource or not.


We didn't spend too much time on use of colour etc. as the site would be re branded, as this is an area where my skills aren't good I would have liked more.


All in all a fantastic learning experience and one I will look forward to repeating!