User testing on the D.L.

October 28, 2002 | 0 Comments

Last week I spent some time doing some more low budget user testing. The internet redesign team has been working on some stuff for quite awhile now, and we’ve made a very slow but steady progress to the point where we are able to start getting some actual work done. We’ve come up with a concept design as well as a pretty solid IA for the .org site and feel really good about the way it’s going.

Up until now we’ve only had feedback from our stakeholders, which can be at times a wee bit biased, for all that they are the people who matter when it comes to moving the project forward. Well, for now anyway, at some point the big boys (and girls) weigh in. Anyway, we had a meeting a few weeks back and based upon that feedback we felt compelled to adjust our design a bit - they had some good comments and brought up somethings we’d not thought about. Plus we need some kind of buy off from these various boards, etc. Anyway - We let the review board and stakeholders know that the people who really mattered when it came to this stuff were our users, and they (thank goodness) seemed to accept that idea. Now - we have a pretty good idea of who our audiences (we have a few, and that is a whole ‘nother story) are and what they are going to be looking for, well, we hope. We just didn’t have any feedback on our work from someone outside the organization.

I suggested we mock up some variations of our designs, without throwing what we had done away and recruit some innocent bystandards to check them out for us. Providing general feedback, ease of use, etc. We removed everything from these mock-ups but a functional version of our main navagation. I think we have a pretty good handle on how the content will be displayed, and we do plan on some full scale usability testing a bit down the road.

In any case the feedback we got was mostly in line with what we had thought, and it helped us clairfy our concept a bit. But I think the real gain will be in the fact that we now have some actual data to back up our decisions. An example of user testing that might have benefits outside the norm, huh? Overall it was a bit of an awkward process, but we did get some good feedback that will hopefully help us move forward and lighen the load when we get to more formal user testing. Thanks to everyone who helped out.

Filed under: IA and Usability