It's Windy, but a Great Place for Usability Testing

Henry Broaddus and I will spend April 23 and 24 in Chicago for usability testing. From 1:00PM to 8:00PM both days, we'll be at mStoner's main office as high schools juniors in the Chicago area arrive to test drive a mock up of the new design for the W&M web site.

Using the expertise of Patrick DiMichele, we have a draft usability testing protocol that will help us evaluate and confirm choices we've made about navigation and information architecture. Thanks to Steve Otto, we have some tasks that will be used to test terminology and organization for academic department web sites.

Thanks also to Joel Pattison for being the warm up act for this post! As Joel related in his description of the software development process for Tribe Voices, we want to do real-world testing of our new W&M web site while there is still time to make adjustments.

Here are just a few of the tasks that the testing moderator will prompt the Chicago high school students to do on a mock up of the new W&M site:

• Find a list of majors / minors.
• Find information about student clubs.
• Visit the English Department site.

I'll blog while we're there. For the very interested, I offer a more complete version of our draft usability testing protocol (pdf).

posted by Susan Evans