[Sigia-l] Re: Research on Reading Online

[Eric Scheid]

From: Madhu Menon <webguru at vsnl.net> (8/8/02 5:41 AM)
>I don't understand this at all. Why are *you* setting the context of the 
>usability test? What about what your *users* want from the Web site? Why 
>don't you let *them* set the context instead? That's a true test. If you 
>ask them to search for ProductX, you're not doing it the right way. Who 
>knows if your users even *want* to read about ProductX? 

I would hope that an enterprise would have, before getting into the site 
building process, developed their business strategy and performed market 
research. If not, you could well end up designing a website that 
satisfies the user but fails the business, which seeing as it's the one 
footing the bills means the users get chumped too.

So, do the market research to build your user profiles first, then do an 
audience needs assessment, wait on corporate to confirm a businss case 
exists, do more user research to build personas, do some task analysis, 
develop the user scenarios ... and then you've got what you need to 
design and plan your prototypes which you can then test.

>Also, the path taken by someone unfamiliar with ProductX is likely to 
>be different from someone who knows exactly what it is, and hence is 
>more likely to know, say, what category it falls under.

To be fair to Caryn, the original situation presented wasn't "searching 
for Product X", but "here is a health situation, here is the website, go 
for it". Quite different, and one which naturally follows persona and 
scenario development. In effect, it's testing the persona's scenarios 
against the website (or vice versa) ... what's the point of devloping 
personas and scenarios otherwise if they aren't going to be used in 
testing? At the very least, the usability testing protocol should include 
screening the recruited candidates against the user profiles and user 
personas, and a sanity check of the user scenarios.

>>We did a usability test with an early prototype, where we gave users some
>>pre-canned health situations and asked them to find the information we're
>>presenting on our site.

e.

______________________________________________________________________
eric at ironclad.net.au                 i r o n c l a d   n e t w o r k s
information architect                      http://www.ironclad.net.au/