O'Reilly Network Usability Testing - July 2000 Introduction |
The O'Reilly Open Source Convention was a perfect opportunity to connect with the target audience of oreillynet.com and get as much feedback as possible from them. After some discussion among Nancy, Derrick and myself, we decided to attempt to take advantage of the opportunity by conducting actual usuability testing.
You can follow the links at the bottom of each of these pages, or in the top sidebars, to read this entire report. If you're just interested in what we found out from our testing without background information, you may want to jump directly to Conclusions, where we present the top usability problems found and discuss potential solutions and plans of action.
One important thing to keep in mind is that usability testing is not the same as conducting a user survey. A user survey, in which respondents volunteer suggestions and express what they might want in a site, can be a useful marketing tool. Usability testing, however, strives to discover problems users actually have in real life. Our respondents did offer many interesting suggestions and comments about the site, which are documented throughout this report. However, our goal is to focus on the usability issues.
The number of test respondents may be surprising: there are only four. (We originally scheduled six and hoped to get five). We are hoping to follow the iterative model of testing with only a few respondents, then fixing the biggest problems, then testing again.
Because we had never done usability testing before, we expected to learn as much about the process of testing as we might about problems on the site.
For more general background on Web usability, see the Related Reading links at the end of this report.
Continue to Respondent Selection and Profiles
Terrie Schweitzer, August 2000