(1) Continue to develop (or start a new) paper prototype based on new insights or feedback from your peers.
As there was no testing during last tutorial, we couldn’t gather any feedback to develop our paper prototype. However, we implemented a few changes compare to last week.
This means couple of more slides on our paper prototype, so the idea and process of working with the political compass by the users is more clear.
(2) Conduct (at least) 3 formative usability tests.
SCRIPT:
(1) Hinweise für den User
Small-talk
Disclaimer: “Wir testen die App, nicht dich! Fragen bitte gerne stellen, ich kann aber nicht versprechen, alle Fragen direkt zu beantworten! Bitte laut denken (Think aloud).”
(2) Kontext der Anwendung
Veritas ist eine App, die für alle gesellschaftspolitisch interessierten Menschen entwickelt wurde. Veritas bietet Usern die Möglichkeit, URLs oder Themen einzugeben. Den Usern wird dann ein umfangreicher Überblick über das Thema gezeigt.
(3) evtl. kurzer Fragebogen (Fragen zur Person)
Wie alt bist du?
Was studierst du?
(4) Szenario(s) und
Du bist auf der Website der NYTimes. Du liest einen spannenden Kommentar zu einem Thema, das dich interessiert. Du findest den Artikel nicht sehr ausgewogen und würdest gerne andere Perspektiven auf dieses Thema einholen.
Benutze die veritas-App, um ähnliche Artikel zu finden.
(5) Aufgaben
- Suchen mittels der Artikel URL aus dem Zwischenspeicher weitere Artikel
- Beschaffe dir eine Übersicht zu einem Thema
- Sortiere die Artikel nach “Opposite first”
- Schaue dir die Statistik zu diesem Thema an
- Finde andere Artikel indem du den politischen Kompass verwendest
- Kehre zur Startseite zurück
- Entdecke weitere Themen
(6) Abschließende Fragen
Hast du noch irgendwelche Fragen oder Anregungen?
(7) Abschluss
Danke für deine Zeit
ROLES
In terms of roles of moderator and observer during the tests we were changing positions each test. The tests were conducted in single sessions, so there was no confusion about that for our participants. We decided that Daniel, Arne and Clemens will be moderators for each test, as they are German speakers. This way the participants would feel more comfortable as they were German speakers and there would be less problems with understanding.
RECORDING
As our prototype is in digital form, all three tests took place online, through Discord platform, where our participants could easily share their screen with the prototype that was provided to them through link during the session. All of us could see how they go through our prototype, while thinking aloud, so there was no issue with taking notes during the test.
WHO AND HOW LONG?
| Participant | Yingshan | Charlotte | Ela |
| Age | 23 | 29 | 23 |
| Occupation | Student of Biochemistry | Finished her history master and is now looking for work | Student of Chemistry |
| Facilitator-role | Clemens | Arne | Daniel |
| Observer | Arne, Daniel | Mateusz, Daniel | Mateusz, Clemens |
| Time | 15 min | 16 min | 14 min |
(3) Document and evaluate the results of your testing.
What method did you use to evaluate the results of your usability tests? How did you evaluate the results?
After conducting the usability tests we met for analyse of the results. We went through the notes together and thoroughly talked about them. There were also comments from our side, what we saw during the tests and how do we feel about usage of our prototype. From all these data we gathered, we extracted the takeaways.
What did you learn from the testing? What are your main takeaways?
It occurred that there were some issues with understanding the context of political compass and political spectrum. Some users might be not familiar with those terms and their functionality. As this appears to be a problem, political compass should be designed in the clearest possible way, so there would be no misunderstanding or confusion for the users. Providing this tool is crucial for functionality of the platform, in order for users to extract the most during building their unbiased view on the topic.
One of the good ideas from our participants was to gather feedback from the users on the articles. Users could rate the positioning and effectiveness of political spectrum. This would help us in developing the platform.
Another problem appeared with the home screen of the platform. Our participants stated that without context it is hard to determine what is it about. This should be improved, however we believe that our users now beforehand what this platform is about and they go for our tool with an idea what do they want to achieve. Our “paper” prototype might have not been clear enough due to our manual skills with creating it.
In our paper prototype we focused mainly on the use case, when the user searches an article by an URL to explore particular topic. Our participants of the usability test pointed that the list of topics to explore should be developed in the prototype. This showed us that users would be interested also in this use case and it is worth to focus on that.
Other takeaways that were discovered from the usability test:
– On what basis is the topic shown on the explore view?
– Clicking on the small political compass on articles should be maybe also implemented in the political compass view
– Articles in Article list take too much space if there were too many articles
– Political spectrum in articles overview seen as key differentiator
Reflexion
Who made what contribution?
The script was prepared during last tutorial and we improved it afterwards before conducting usability tests. On our weekly meeting after tutorial we discussed the prototype again and Daniel made necessary changes. We conducted usability tests in separate sessions, the roles were pointed before in the blog post. We discussed and summarized the data from the tests together and Mateusz wrote the blog post.
What did you learn?
The usability test gave us different perspective on our prototype. For us, everything was clear and understandable as it is our idea and we are working on it for quite some time. As for the person that have first contact with this topic it appeared that some aspects are not that obvious. It gave us a lesson that we need to focus more on presentation of our idea. We do not want the future users to be discouraged by first interaction with our platform.
What went well?
This week there were no delays and lack of communication, so we are definitely happy about that. We improved ourselves on this aspect.
What would you like to improve?
The results from usability tests showed us what we need to work on. As mentioned above, users need to get better idea of the context of the platform.