Working Title: Avocado Elementary School Web Site
Author: Joshua S. Bleier
Date: 12/02/02

 

Subjects
  I once again had as subjects the parent of Avocado school children, an Avocado teacher, and the principal of Avocado Elementary school. In addition, I tested a potential parent of an elementary school child (Also known as my wife).
Think Aloud Tasks
 

Since I was using essentially the same test subjects as before, I varied the tasks as much as I could given the lack of depth of the site. In addition, I was less concerned with organization of and navigation through the site, and more interested in the aesthetics, or 'look and feel', of the pages. As a result, the tasks were simple, and the Post-Test Interview focused on what they liked and didn't like about how the site looked and whether the usage was straight-forward. The Tasks were:

  • Sign up for more information about the PTA.
  • Find out what's for lunch on Monday, December 9th.

I also asked the subjects to think about the aesthetics of the site and what they liked and disliked about it.

Summary of Think Alouds
 

With the first usability study, all participants navigated easily through the site with no problems getting to the information requested during the Think-Alouds. One of the suggestions from the first study was to allow site users to access the lunch schedule, and since lunch was only accessed from the Daily Schedule page, I placed the link to the district lunch schedule on this page. As it turns out, this was not an obvious place to look for lunch. Only the person who suggested the link to the lunch menu was able to navigate successfully to that location. The others first attempted to access this data from the Calendar page rather than the Daily Schedule page.

Navigation to the PTA membership information location was far more straightforward, and none of the subjects had any trouble accessing that piece of information.

Summary of Post-Test Interview
 

Users mentioned that other then the difficulty accessing the lunch menu, the site was easy to navigate. As mentioned before, this had more to do with the overall simplicity and lack of depth of the site.

I also asked subjects to think about the look of the page, and a majority of them requested more color, especially with respect to page background. I had swapped out the gray background that existed for my initial usability study based on user input. But apparently a plain white background was also unappealing.

Findings to be Implemented
 

Based on user input, I plan to:

  • Add a duplicate link to the lunch menu page from the Calendar page.
  • Change the background so that it includes a brighter color while not detracting from the readability of the pages.
Findings that will not be Implemented
  There were no requests for changes that conflicted with important aspects of the page, so both changes will be implemented.