Designer – User testing

After researching the user testing the previous week, I then had to put together an actual user test which would be done on the day. My research had shown me that the test would be broken down into 3 sections, starting with an initial impressions section which would be used to gauge what they thought about the site at the first look.

Sections
The second section would be comprised of scenarios which the user would follow. These would be both on screen by the computer, and on camera to see the facial reactions of the test subject.

The final section would ask the user what their opinions of the site were, and would ask them what they think would need changing.

For the scenarios, I tried to write ones which would test a selection of the pages we had finished. As we were lacking rather a lot of content (due to our client not providing it) there were not a huge number of scenarios we could do without repetition. I think that the scenarios were the best we could have put together with the information we had available to us at the time.

Testing Day

On the day of the test we prepared our equipment as we had prepared the week previous. However, as with most things in this project, id did not go quite as smoothly as we liked. None of our testers showed up, which we all felt was very frustrating and inconsiderate, as we have all put a considerable amount of time into this project. <

Our backup plan was to ask fellow students from our class to do the test, and this way we would at least have some results to evaluate. This went well, and has provided us with some good information about the changes which need to be made to the site, which Chris has posted below.

Self Study

This week I have been writing up a report of our usability testing, which I will be illustrating on Thursday after I have got some feedback from the team about the written content. This will of course be done in academic format, with references to other parts of the project, screenshots and the video which I will be putting together next week. I will then assemble all of the resources together and prepare them for the folder by playing them in plastic wallets, and by amending the names at the bottom of the sheets so that is ready for submission.

All in all it was not as bad a week as I had anticipated, and now we can concentrate on finishing the site and putting the final submissions together over the remaining weeks.

Developer - User Testing

The user testing didn't exactly go as expected but from the feedback we got from our peers I think we got better results. There are a few issues about the website that arose, nothing too serious though, they can be changed quite easily.

Had we have user tested the Sports students I don't think we would have had as accurate results.

The following changes need to be made:

• Scrolling on profiles
• Incorrect link
• Some errors on Flash Slideshow
• Some links not obvious

Scrolling on Profiles
This has been sorted by adding anchors to the website to let the user click a name and be taken to that part of the site, Football section has been changed but I need to add links that let the user go back to the top.

Incorrect Link
One of the links on the Introduction page was incorrect trying to point to a file in the "rubgy" folder. This has been changed and after the site is more or less complete a thorough 'examination' will be undertaken.

Some errors in Flash
On closer inspection the Flash Slideshow had the top border missing so it looked like there was a little 'tick' or extention at the top of the file. This has been sorted but I think a keyline is needed as the static images have borders and it would lose consistency.

Another unresolved issue with the Flash is that the drop down menus hide behind the flash. I have asked John how to sort this

Some links not obvious
The links on the Match Reports page was not really that obvious it was a link so I have no received the image of a piece of paper (like other sports sites) to show it is a Match Report Link.

To Do

• Sort the rest of the website out
• Add faces to names in the profiles
• Do cross browser report
• Look at the accessibility guidelines
• Find how to make Flash accessible

Those in red are the more important ones to complete.

22/11/07 P.M. Entry

The week started off on a positive note with an email from Harriet saying that she had completed all of the player profiles for the site, Mark also requested that they do another shoot in the gym the following day to get some action shots of the athletes doing a "Bleep" test. Things were looking up, as we now have an abundance of images to choose from for the site.

I remained in a positive frame ahead of the user trials which where coming up on Thursday although I had niggling worries about the test but both Chris and Julian responded to requests I had asked them to do in preparation for the trial which put my mind at rest. I had contacted Mark on several occasions to confirm that he would send 5 of his students to carry out the test, I had heard nothing until the day before when I received confirmation that he would be sending 5 of his students at 10.30 the following day. Hooray! I thought, things were coming together.

So I went into college armed with my kettle and some chocolates(to give to our testers) fairly optimistic that things would go to plan. Until 10.45 am when I had a feeling that no one was going to turn up, so the team along with Steve took direct action and went to find Mark to hopefully round up our user testers! we split up an covered the college campus in a military style man hunt, but again Mark was hard to find.

At this point morale was pretty low, as we had set up all the kit and we only had 2 hours to complete the test before the other groups had to get in and do their own tests. I questioned Mark's commitment to the site and wondered if had asked his students to go? or they just didn't bother to turn up? either way we had to do our test today so we got some sporty types from the rest of the class to complete the test.

I know that they did not fit the target audience and all the test subjects we used had a high level of computer/browsing knowledge,but we did get some really useful results from the test, more so than we would have got from the target audience users. Special thanks to Marc who gave the most constructive feedback out of all the testers.

Going forward I hope to arrange a meeting with Mark to talk about all the outstanding content we still need for the site, I have all the images to optimise for the player profiles and the flash movie which has changed again, Chris will finish it off as he will need to make sure that it will be made accessible.

I will also start to compile the Final folder content to make sure we have everything covered before the stress of the deadline!

Developer Update (20/11/07)

Apologies but I didn't date the first entry.

So far the website is only missing marginal content. Most issues have been resolved and is near completion. I would like a few more match reports added to demonstrate the anchoring of the links. Whether or not this is possible though is another issue.

I am missing the profiles for the Athletes but again this can be resolved easily.

Thursday
If it is okay I would like to do some cross browser testing Scott so if possible can I borrow your mac if this is okay for me to do so. I will write a small report and any findings/issues and how they were resolved.

Apart from that I think we are on track to complete the website before our temp deadline.

A question I would like to raise about the profile pictures is I know in some of the shots the players are facing ---> but I think that they should be flipped to be facing into the page as the profile images are on the right hand side of the page. So in my opinion they should be facing inwards towards the text.

Website so far

P.M. Entry - 15th November

Thursday at college we set up a mock test environment which included a video camera and a screen recorder in preparation for User Trials that will be taking place on the 22nd Nov. It was a much needed opportunity to run through the test procedures so we have a clear idea what we have to do in a weeks time.

We didn't actually carry out a user trial, as such but it was an ideal situation to look at the site in an objective form, we picked up some obvious flaws with the navigation that would of been overlooked. We also formulated the scenarios that the user will attempt to do during the trial based on the research that Julian carried out, for example we will ask the user to find out "What Rugby position does Gareth Potts play?" this will enable us to gauge how easy our site is to navigate by timing the action carried out by the user. We will ask the user to give us a verbal cue once they have read and understood the request, to give us a starting point for timings.

I am still worried about getting the users for our trial, as they are the students on the sports course, who I have asked, through Mark to take part. I know in the past they have been unreliable, when asked to turn up to have their player profile shots one left before having his picture taken and will have to be "shot" at a later date. But as I said last week we may have to go to the canteen and encourage some sports students to take part.

We are only a few weeks away from the deadline and I am confident in Chris's ability to get the job done on time, my main concern is not having all the content. The images should be done within the next week, but the written content is still not complete. I have told the client that we are behind our production schedule and will continue to keep the pressure on him until we receive all the information.

P.M. Entry - 8th November

This week the focus for me and perhaps most of the others has been on the "Culture Vulture" assignment which has probably eaten into this assignments time plans a bit. This will be a continual struggle the closer we get to the deadline for each of the projects, we do hope to finish "on the job" about three weeks before the final hand in day.

Harriet and some of the other Photography students had set up a studio photo shoot for the player profiles but Mark failed to turn up with the players from the teams, which is very frustrating when they had gone to all the trouble and could have been doing other things that were a lot more constructive with their time.

Thursday was a productive day, we tried and failed to find Mark to ask him some questions regarding player profiles and some other details. But I did get the content for the site from the marketing department by actually going down to the office and requesting they put the file onto my USB drive. I think this direct action can be most rewarding as sitting around waiting for emails can be really frustrating.

I also received the images from Harriet of the rugby and football teams training which I then cropped for use in the Flash movie. Chris started the movie, but as he has a lot to do building the site I suggested I would complete it. I have used Flash a fair bit before so it isn't too difficult, but I think it will be a time consuming production. I need to ask him how to replace a Movie symbol as this will save time.

I haven't talked about Project Manager's meetings yet in my journal entries, as a lot of the time it isn't totally related to the assignment, but we have been discussing User Testing which we will be doing on the 22nd November. I thought it would make sense to pool all of our resources to accomplish this task, as it is a big subject the more brain power we have will benefit us all.

We will be staging a "Mock" trial on the 15th where we will set up all the systems we will use for the real test. Craig has been researching screen reading software that records the users mouse movements and we will use video cameras to record the users facial expressions but we still need to figure a way of syncing these two bits of information together to get an accurate account of the users experience.

Julian has been busy researching User testing and has constructed a user scenario which will include tasks for the user to find out for e.g. How many goals where scored in a certain match on a certain day. Also some general questions about the site design, to see if we need to change anything.

We are relying on Mark to coerce his students to help out with the user testing as they are our dedicated target audience, we also may have to go down to the canteen or the library and invite some sports students into the testing environment with the promise of chocolate (or healthy stuff of some description!) to entice them in.

The site will hopefully be in some form of finished state at this point, as we are slowly getting content supplied to us, even if it is in a "drip drip" form.

Developer Update

Task List so far

• Research into CMS/Delivery Requirements(DR)
• Play with CMS
• Build Skeletal Site
• Started to create the Flash Slideshow for first page
• Build Official Site
• Add some content from the Prospectus

Research into CMS/DR
This was an easy starter task and required me to look into using a Content Management System or CMS. I found a few which looked as if they would be easy to use. Some did look difficult to use and I think this is where our first problem arose.

Play with CMS
Originally this looked as if this would be a brilliant piece system that could be implemented but then several factors arose. E.g. Would Dean allow us to impose something on his network, could have some privacy/security issues, Marc wants to update this so would it be easy for him to and how would he do it?. So we eventually decided this may be difficult to implement. However Dean has a system in place so this could allow for the site to be updated.

Build Skeletal Site
Initially I had troubles making the website render correctly in Fire Fox. The website has 3 elements a top section where the website content begins, a middle section that is supposed to replicate itself downwards and a bottom image that is meant to sit at the bottom of the site. In Fire Fox this was not the case as the background did not repeat downwards.

Flash Slideshow
This has been taken over by Scott as the website was proving to be a big task to complete. He has been advised that it would need to be smaller in order to fill the space on the site without overlapping the maincontent div.

Build Official Website
The website is nearly completed, the template idea has been ditched as it was making a few problems. It is attached to a single CSS page and Dean's Wakefield College banner now validates and it would have earlier had I created it from scratch. It was only simple errors that when one was fixed it removed 4 errors, starting with 39 ending in 0 creating a XHTML 1.0 Strict Valid site.

Content
We are still waiting for some of the content so to fill the space, possibly will be the final content anyway, I have added the content from the college prospectus.

Current State
The website is currently near completion and will be ready for user testing on Thursday.

All in all I think that this site is quite impressive and looks so much better with the content in place. Currently waiting for a temporary match report from Scott and a mini icon for Match Reports from Julian.

P.M. Reading Week 1/11/07

This was our first reading week, which seemed to be more of a pressured situation than being at college. I have worked from home before and I always feel a tendency to work harder, than if I were at work or college.

Julian and myself managed to catch up with the client and I found out that my none returned emails was nothing to do with being ignored, but I had a problem with my email as they were appearing blank to the recipient.

Mark told me that he was sending them back to me but they were just bouncing back to him, I had several "live chats" with my host and they told me that there was nothing wrong. I had changed my email client to Mac mail to try and be more organised. This obviously backfired and I had to revert back to Entourage, I have not had any more problems so I will stick with this in the future.

We had our meeting with Mark and the marketing department and I finally got to see some of the content for the web site, I asked for this to be sent to me via my other email address, but it has still yet to appear.

We talked through the skeleton site which Chris had done in preparation for the meeting, we discussed having a dummy banner ad to encourage sponsorship, as this is a long term goal for the site. Mark seemed happy with the progress so far so I asked him to sign the client sign off sheet which he did. We also discussed the need to re-shoot the rugby and football teams training so we could have all the players wearing the official kit as it would show a more cohesive look to the finished site, and would ultimately work better as a marketing tool for the course.

Returning home we attempted to have an MSN production meeting, which in theory seemed like a good idea, but in reality was a real pain. It was really unproductive and a waste of time, I am not a fan!

I then re-sent all of the failed emails out to both Harriet and Mark to explain what had happened and to get things back on track. The main thing that is slowing the production process down at the moment is the lack of content, but things will hopefully improve as I as have now received 2 player profiles!

P.M. Entry - Half way through Evaluation "On the Job"

As we agreed at our production meeting before half term we would all compile an evaluation for the half way point of the assignment.

At the very start of the assignment we had we had been put into groups where we discussed among other topics, all of our strengths and weaknesses so we could decide the team roles.

As I am the eldest and have had experience in dealing with customers in my job I found myself in the position of Project Manager. I wanted to have this role from the start, as it would force me out of my comfort zone and would hopefully result in a more rewarding experience.

Chris would be the Developer and Julian would be the designer/ P.A.

13th September unlucky for some, me perhaps as I was up for doing the pitch for the two jobs that were on offer, generic sports and a children's nursery.

When it came to the preparation for the pitch, I must admit I didn't plan it very well, my first thoughts were that we should all have an input and therefore each contribute for our area. But as it came close to the day before the pitch the rest of the members of the team expressed an opinion that it would be better if I should do it on my own, which I agreed too.

When we came to this decision we put a plan of action together to get all the information needed for the deadline. I have to admit that I was happy that we all pulled together, with a lot of late night file swapping and MSN messages we got the job done.

I was pleased that we won the pitch to build the sports web site, the details were unclear regarding what was involved in the web site but I was sure our team could carry out the task. The site would be called the athlete development program and all we had was a rough site map from Mark Helme who is the course leader.

I assumed from the start that this type of project would have data that needed to be updated on a regular basis like the match results and league tables, so the idea of having some form of content management for this was a necessity. It would also prove to be one of the biggest headaches for the first half of the assignment, due to the fact that we will be hosting the site on the college server, we were unsure of the requirements needed to do this.

After several meetings with the college webmaster Dean I was unsure of the best method to use for making the site easily adaptable for the client, Chris had explored several solutions for this so I decided that he should see the Dean himself, as he would be building the site. This proved to be beneficial as Chris has a more in depth understanding of the technical side of web development.

The outcome of it was that Chris will build and validate the site using HTML extensions then will change all the relevant extensions to ASP. So Dean can then add the correct functionality to the specific pages to make them adaptable.

The design of the site was done by Julian, who after carrying out competitive analysis came up with a simple clean design. As the site will be part of the college we had to take certain considerations into the design, as there is a top navigation with drop down buttons we had to use a side navigation to avoid confusion for the user. For the client meeting we decided to show two different colour ways, the first was grey with orange and the second was a dark blue with a lighter tone for the highlights.

During the early part of the production process Mark had been in contact with the Photography students at college to take the images for the player profiles, we managed to meet up with them at the start of October to talk through the requirements for the site.

I thought we could also use some images of the students training instead of the Video that Mark wanted and play them in a Flash movie on the homepage, this would add a much more professional feel to the site than using video.

I have largely relied on Harriet to liaise with Mark to arrange times and dates for the shoots, although up until now there has only been one photo shoot. I feel that we are really lucky to have their input which will add an extra element to the finished site.