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!