As we are about to start planning things for UMN testing, I would like share some ideas. As we all know there plenty things that needs to be ironed out like what do we test?, how many participants do we need?, how much are we compensating them?, how long should be the sessions?, whom should we test - new users or experts or both? Oh, well ! For such and many more questions, we have the meeting next time :) But just to get things started I would like share what we would possibly test. The intent is solicit ideas and suggestions and start a conversation.
What to test? It is the million dollar question, isn’t it? With so many things to be tested under the Drupal umbrella, it is going to be a challenge to prioritize. There are several approaches which we could take - the site builder Jeremy and the tasks which he does (at different stages during site building) or that of a site contributor ( who is mostly responsible for managing content) or someone who is both: a site builder and a contributor. With some overlap, each of them have very different roles and tasks associated with them. Also, their view of the website world might be very different. After some initial thinking, may be this study could focus around the first experience of Jeremy because:
* The first experience of using Drupal is not an easy one. If we make this process smoother, we are improving the experience of the novice user and encouraging him to do more. ( As Drupal is getting more widespread, we need to cater to our users who are not the techy-techy sorts. By taking the universal design approach, we are catering to other user sets too)
* I know the other things mentioned above are crucial and needs to be tested. I am conducting a lot of usability studies which are around those. It would be helpful for us if we tests which I have not tested or planned. This way, we will be making most of our time and gather more data. This would certainly help us in inching towards a super D8 UX.
We could bind the study around the scenario that Jeremy just finished installing Drupal and he is excited about creating his site. Although a big enthusiast, he is green to Drupal. Based on this, I have created a few tasks which normally a user would do during their first interaction.
* Task 1: Now that you have installed Drupal, you would like to take some time and explore the system. Take a few moments and let me know what are your first impressions about the system. (The rationale is that users would most likely do some exploration on the system before actually using it. This way we are making them familiar to the system.)
* Task 2: You would like to change the visual look of your website. What would you do? (I believe first time users are intrigued with the appearance of their site. It is very important to them. They might not finalize on the look of the website, but would certainly be interested in knowing what options are available to them.) This test is focused on “Appearance”
* Task 3 A: You have heard about modules on Drupal and think that this could be a good resource for your website. How would you explore this feature?
* Task 3 B: Based on what you saw, you would like to install a module which allows you to <insert a popular module>. How would you install this module? (The goal of this task is to understand how they find and install modules. At the end of the study, if time permits we can ask the participate to uninstall a module)
* Task 4: You would like to change your site name and also add a slogan (or a logo) to the website. How would you do that?
* Task 5: You would also like to create a section “About me” on the left hand side of the website which appears on all the pages. How would you do that? (This task will cover creating content, creating a block and positioning a block)
Throughout the test, we could also observe how they use the toolbar and probe on what they think about the terminology. Also note, we will have pre-session and post session questions along with probing questions for each of the task.
What do you think?
Looking forward to your comments!