This past week the eight of use conducted paper prototyping and tested our ideas for Legacy’s new webpage on a few people. We drew out paper versions of the page and all the sections we want to include, and several of us marched to nearby coffee shops and academic buildings to interview people in our audience age group.
One of the main criticisms that stood out was regarding our concept of an editorial page, a potential section on Legacy.com that will include articles and editorials by a staff journalist, links to Associated Press obituaries, links to interesting obituaries from other newspapers like the New York Times and perhaps a section on who died on this day in history. It would involve mostly obituaries of prominent people, but not necessarily.
Read more…
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.