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challenging or frustrating about using the NASA website about the Apollo Space
Program (Tullis, 2008b). In a word cloud, larger text is used to represent words
that appear more frequently. It's apparent from this word cloud that participants
were commenting frequently on the “search” on the site and the “navigation.”
(Some frequent words, such as “Apollo,” are certainly not surprising given the
subject matter.)
EXCEL TIP
Finding All Comments That Include a Specific Word
After studying a word cloud (and the accompanying word frequencies that most of
these tools can generate), it's sometimes helpful to find all of the verbatim comments
that included specific words anywhere in the comment. For example, after seeing the
word cloud in Figure 6.25 , it might be helpful to find all the comments that included
the word “navigation.” This can be done in Excel using the =SEARCH function. You
can then sort on the column containing the results of the SEARCH function. Entries
containing the target word will have numeric values (actually the character position
where the target word starts) and those that don't contain the target word will give a
“#VALUE!” error.
6.7.4 Awareness and Comprehension
A technique that somewhat blurs the distinction between self-reported data and
performance data involves asking the users some questions about what they saw
or remember from interacting with the application or website after they have
performed some tasks with it and not being allowed to refer back to it. One fla-
vor of this is a check for awareness of various features of a website. For example,
consider the NASA homepage shown in Figure 6.26 . First, the user would be
given a chance to explore the site a little and complete a few very general tasks,
such as reading the latest news from NASA and finding how to get images from
the Hubble Space Telescope. Then, with the site no longer available to the user,
a questionnaire is given that lists a variety of specific pieces of content that the
site may or may not have had.
These would generally be content not related directly to the specific tasks that
the user was asked to perform. You're interested in whether some of these other
pieces of content “stood out” to the user. The user then indicates which of the
pieces of content on the questionnaire he or she remembers seeing on the site.
For example, two of the items on the questionnaire might be “When the ISS
Crew is Due to Return” and “Satellite observation of the Western wildfires,” both
of which are links on the homepage. One of the challenges in designing such
a questionnaire is that it must include logical “distracter” items as well—items
that were not on the website (or page, if you limit the study to one page) but that
look like they could have been.
A closely related technique involves testing for users' learning and compre-
hension related to some of the content of the website. After interacting with a
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