Usability Report

You will conduct 5 usability tests on the IU Telecom Grad Blog: http://iutelecomgrad.wordpress.com

The IU Telecom Grad Blog is a news site that communicates stories about graduate students and faculty in the Telecom department. The audience includes current, former, and prospective students, as well as faculty in other IU departments, and people outside of IU that want to know more about the Telecom graduate program and faculty in general. The blog is not a source for "hard news." It does not duplicate stories in the IU Home Pages or College of Arts & Sciences Bulletin. The aim is to communicate stories that are fun or entertaining and give readers a sense of the department's culture and personality. With this usability test, you will help reveal how well the site is serving that purpose.

You are expected to test five different people. Start your test using Steve Krug's outline and the questions that were demonstrated in class:

What do you think this site is about?
Where do you think the various links lead? What would you expect if you clicked on each?
What are you inclined to click on first?

Next, ask your testers to perform the following tasks:

Find the story titled, "The Artist and the Academic."
How do you join the blog's mailing list?
Locate the audio recording of David Waterman's talk, "Are the Media Shrinking?"
Find a link that leads to the IU Department of Telecommunications web site
What information can you find about orientation week?

Before you start your tests be sure that you are familiar with how to do each of these tasks—if you can't do them you will be unable to evaluate how the site performs for others.

The test
Your five test subjects can be anyone (remember Krug's "recruit loosely" rule). Follow the testing process we discussed in class and the test described in Chapter 9 of Steve Krug's usability book. Let your subjects take the lead by encouraging them to "think out loud." Focus on how they use the site and the conclusions they draw about the information and services it has to offer. All the while, remember to pay greater attention to their actions than their opinions. After the test take thorough notes on what they did, what you observed, and any quick conclusions you might be able to draw.

Your report should include the following elements:

Notes from all five of your usability tests that outline problems and possible solutions discovered during each test (please type if these were initially hand-written)
A bullet-point, "executive summary" of the usability test results (You will need to download a PDF copy of Chapter 10 from the first edition of "Don't Make Me Think." The executive summary required for this report doesn't appear in the second edition of Krug's book. See p. 173 of the Chapter 10 PDF for details)
2 full pages (minimum) detailing the conclusions you can draw from your usability tests: What works? What doesn't? Is the site navigable? How could the site be organized differently?
The report is due by 5 pm Monday, December 12. Post your report to Oncourse/Assignments 2 as a MS Word doc or docx.

Project feedback
Everyone will have an opportunity to get comments on their usability report before they turn in a final version. Before lecture class on November 29, post a rough draft of your usability report to Oncourse/Assignments 2. We will anonymously review these in class and discuss strategies for writing and summarizing in your final reports.

Return to T284/Grading