Monday, March 9, 2009

Summary of Usability Testing

This is a summary of all the usability testing that was done excluding the card sort. I'm not entirely sure how to evaluate those.

Dr. Project Usage:
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Used mainly for wiki as place to keep meeting notes and contact information. Thought it was useful in managing larger groups.
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Most conversations happened over e-mail and actually in meetings.
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Revision history and event log was also found useful by another subject.
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Tickets were not considered part of the work flow. It was mostly used to tell other group members to do something

Search:
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Default search settings for global navigational search area should search based on the current scope. So if the user is viewing a certain project, they would expect that the general search will be in the scope of that project and if they are viewing all projects, then the search should be in the scope of all projects. Possibly context sensitive as well.
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General Search default setting should be across all projects and content types with option to set scope from search box.
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Could add Blog to content types
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Change date formatting and text prompts since they are unclear and confusing to users.
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Allowing regular expression and special syntax for search would be useful for more users who are accustomed to using them.
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Alternate design idea for projects – make projects listed in drop down menu with an add button next to it. Then the user will select a project, click on “Add” button and a list will appear with their selections. It will also have to allow for users to remove projects. This list could then be saved to the user preferences as their default for advanced and general searches if they want.
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Possibly rename Event Log to “Recent Activity” since event log can be somewhat confusing to some users.
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Help pages should have its own search by either adding it to content type, but not including it in general search or embed it in the help menus.
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Rename Mail to “Mail Archive”.
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Allow search for users to find what they have changed or to find contact information possibly as well as the ability to search by user.

Search Results:
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Familiarity with result formatting since it’s similar to Google.
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Drawback to dropdowns and left column filtering is that it only allows you to select one of each project or category. It doesn’t let users select more than one project or one or more categories at the same time.
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Side bar: 3, Drop Downs: 0
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Adding a visual cue as to what filtering is selected would be helpful such as a highlighting on the side bar category and project. We could also add “in project and content” to result titles.
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Result items should somehow display what project they belong to.
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Allowing users to vote on result relevancy.
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Someone incorporating the advanced search options into the results page so that users don’t lose that information they inputted.
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Allowing users to sort their results based on types or projects is missing from the search results.
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Pagination is on the fence, but definitely don’t need “previous page” and “next page” in arrow-ed pagination option.

VCS:
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The main content pane should also contain directories.
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Option for users to type in the directory path that they want. So possibly a text box next to the breadcrumbs where users can type in the directory and file they want to view.
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Filtering files or distinguishing between file types with icons would be useful to see if the file is an image or a text file.
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When viewing files, the filename should be shown in the bread crumbs and the revision comment should also be shown somewhere. Some revision messages may not be file specific, so displaying the message when viewing a file might not be useful.
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In showing more details, it would be more useful to see who committed the previous revisions. Also changing the whole row to be clickable or allowing users to click on the old revision will take them to a diff rather than having a “diff” link for each item.

File Differencing:
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Having both panes linked and only one scroll bar. The placement of the scroll bar is undecided since all three test subject each chose a different option.I think they wanted just the browser to be the method of scrolling -Liz 3/8/09 11:58 AM
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One test subject didn’t like the highlighting in both files. Perhaps only highlighting in the file that changed (i.e. the line that was added, or removed but still adjust whitespace in the other file)
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One additional idea is to add a menu of function or class headers where users can jump to them.
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The ability to change revisions from differencing is also another important feature.
Someone (though I think outside of testing) also said they really wanted it to be all in-line instead of side-by-side. We might want to get more opinions on that. -Liz 3/8/09 11:58 AM

Statistics:
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Statistics seemed like more of a project management item to think about.
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Not an accurate measurement of productivity in most cases.
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Timeline of deadlines and meetings with a calendar would be a nice feature.
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Graph of open and closed tickets or bugs is another feature mentioned that would be useful to have.
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Option to set graphs based on time range such as “Since last login” or “Over all time” to give users more of an update of how much was done since they last logged in. Another user preference could be the Breakdown based on project branches.
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If there were a point system, then it would be nice to see rankings and point breakdowns in.

Landing Page:
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Before logging in, users should be able to see featured projects, management contact information, general recent announcements, and the blog.
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After logging in, users should be able to see updates, recent project activities, user preferences page link, wiki updates.
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Users should have an option to select the order and grouping of updates. Events that occurred since last update should be highlighted.
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If a project has had no activity a statement like “No activity has occurred since last log in” should appear.
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Frequently used pages and announcements are useful. Users should also be able to send announcements for their group. That expire after a certain amount of time or if the user removes/hides them.
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An RSS feed for events would be good for users that like to subscribe.

IA Redesign:
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Must change Project: edit.
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Perhaps putting a search bar within each tab to do relative searches within that context.


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