Usability Report

James Nye’s e-Portfolio Usability Report 11/7/09

Every time I do a usability report I always am surprised by my findings.  I try to set tasks that start easy and end hard, assuming that the later ones will be the least likely to be completed by my users.  I’d say that almost 50% of the time I find that task I think are trivial are the ones that my users struggle with and the harder ones they breeze through.  This test was a perfect example of that.  I asked my users to find all the posts that are tagged with Pedagogy.  Assuming that they would click on a tag from a post that was about it, or at least use the drop down menu to find them.  None, I repeat, none of my users did that.  Most looked on my Pedagogy page and not for the posts themselves.  One user knows blogs and instead choose to use the search function instead which I found out does not search meta data, just titles and content.

Now the task I thought would be hard would be having them find a Hello World post that isn’t about anything and they would have to search for it.  Only the one blog user found it the way I intended with the search box.  The rest of my users just kept scrolling back through all the posts till they found it.  Odd behavior, but reflecting upon it, I tend to do the same thing.  I will scroll through a few pages until I get sick of looking and then seek out an alternative way to find what I am looking for, or leave the site.