Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
10.4.1
Example 1: Deciding on Actions after Usability
Testing
One of our earliest examples of triangulation started with a usability test. The
prospectus homepage consisted of a long list of subjects (
Figure 10.19
).
Figure 10.19 Original list of subjects on the prospectus homepage, as seen on a typical screen.
Most people who consider university study start by looking for the subject
they are interested in. When we asked participants in a usability test to look for
the subject they wanted, we observed that some of them struggled:
•
Whenviewedonatypicalscreenatthattime,someofthelistwas“below
the fold” and not visible to the user (
Figure 10.20
).
•
The list was presented in alphabetical order, which meant that some
related subjects (e.g., Computing and Information Technology) were
separated from each other.
We could have done more testing with more participants to measure exactly
how much of a problem this was, but instead we decided to use web analytics to
investigate the actual behavior of site visitors.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search