Testing the tests
For the past week, our obituary research team has been mocking up some designs of the future Legacy.com. Northwestern professor Jeremy Gilbert graciously shared his knowledge of paper prototyping and usability testing with us, and has been helping us through our initial designs.
Today we tested our tests on two generous NU undergraduate students and got some very valuable information that will help us when we begin our actual testing next week.
The most and possibly best feedback we received was on the homepage design. We have been working on two versions of the page; one with a lot of different information all laid out for the user, and another version with the features and services dispersed into different categories, separated by tabs.
Our research team was pretty evenly split on which design would be best, and I think it’s safe to say that a few more rounds of user testing will solidify which version will be most optimum.
There are definitely some word choices we need to work on in an effort to make search criteria and subject headings more clear to the user. For instance, we think the word newspaper is clearer to a user than the word publication, when they are searching for an obituary or death notice from a particular newspaper or publication. (Have I said newspaper and publication too much?)
But perhaps most importantly, on Halloween Eve, we have decided that we must have plenty of candy to offer to our testing subjects as an incentive/thank you. And we need to make sure that Jake doesn’t eat it all during the testing.