Assignment 6: User Testing & Analysis
October 31st, 2023
Tasks
| Task | Instruction | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Browse and interact with feed | Navigate to the homepage, scroll through the posts, and visit any articles that interest you. | I want to see how users react to the home page, especially if there are any confusing UI features. I would also like to see if users recognize the title as a hyperlink. |
| Create a group of users | Create a new group and add users to it. | The group creation task is relatively simple, but one nuance with the app is that you can only add existing users whose usernames you know. There is no search/friend concept, so I'd like to see how users react to this aspect. |
| Publish a post to one group and all groups | Find an interesting news article and use it to publish a new post to a single group. Then, publish another post to all groups. | I'd like to see how users navigate between the article and the website to enter each required input. There's a couple instances of copying and pasting, and I want to see if users get frustrated with that. Also, I want to see if the users pick up on the visibility aspect of publishing to groups (particularly if they realize selecting no groups publishes to all). |
| Edit a post | Edit an existing post by modifying its note. | I want to see if users would like to have more editing options, whether it's the title, group visibility, or the link. |
| Manage a group | Modify or delete members of a group; change the group name; delete a group. | I'd like to see if it's efficient for users to add or delete users to a group, as well as if they use the ellipse menu bar to edit the group name and delete the group. |
Reports
User 1
While scrolling through the feed, the user quickly decided to select an article link by right clicking and choosing "Open in new tab". The feed seemed pretty intuitive and the user commented that they enjoyed the difference in fonts, specifically of the article titles as compared to other text, and said that it was easy to read. While going through their feed, the user encountered a post without an attached note, but with a remnant outline of a note box. This led to slight confusion as they assumed it was an input box for leaving a comment, which sadly was not true. The user easily navigated to the groups page and created a new group, successfully adding another user as well. They discovered the "User not found" error and commented that messages indicating success or failure were very helpful. While I had originally intended for the user to copy both the title and link when creating a post, the user manually entered a book title in the Title input box, and copied a Wikipedia link of the book into the URL section. I had originally intended this application to be used for news articles, but the user specifically expressed interest in using this for other forms of written media. After posting, the user commented that it was not clear who could see the post, especially when no groups have been created and it's only visible to the user. During the discussion, they also mentioned that they would not have first created a group before posting due to the "optional" note attached to the group menu. While creating a group is not necessary, it's at the core of the application's functionality and the instructions definitely indicate otherwise. Visually, the user enjoyed the familiar interfaces and navigation tools but wished there were more interesting graphics. When logging out, the user hesitated to select the 'settings' tab to find the logout button.
User 2
As the user engaged with the platform, they also had some slight confusion about whether they had the ability to comment on a post. Additionally, they were initially unsure whether or not the note was published by the original poster or left as a comment by another user. However, the user enjoyed the feature of the source being listed on the post, and said that it was helpful to quickly determine whether or not the article was worth reading. When creating a post, this user also immediately went to copy the article's URL, but then manually entered an abbreviated title. I think that this demonstrates how there might be friction due to navigating from the source to this website. Users don't want to navigate between them multiple times, and instinctively copy the URL since that's how websites are usually shared. This user also mentioned that the "groups (optional): " instruction was misleading and did not make it clear that they should create a group before posting. This instruction is poorly worded and doesn't prompt the user towards the action of creating a new group. The user easily created and managed a group when asked, but when deleting a group and post the user remarked that they would prefer to have an "are you sure" button after selecting delete, to ensure that they're not hitting it by accident or just because they might want to reconsider the deletion. When scrolling through the feed again, the user suggested having an additional feature to index posts by content type to not be overwhelmed when there might be many new posts being published at once. This user also mentioned that they would prefer a more visually stimulating home page.
Opportunities for Improvement
- Instruction to create a group before posting lacks clarity (linguistic, major)
- The phrase "groups (optional): \ please create your first group!" fails to prompt a user to create a group before posting due to its vagueness. In the future, I could add a popup with an instruction and explanation about post visibility, as well as adding that information to the groups page. I could additionally add a note on a published post stating that the post is only visible to that user when published to no groups.
- Separate note from comment (physical, moderate)
- The physical outline of the note on a post resembles an input box, which causes confusion to the user who could mistake it for an area to create a comment. Instead, I could move the note to be on the top of the post (to minimize resemblance to a comment), add a label so that it's clearly a caption, or simply add a comment feature.
- Manually extract titles from websites (physical, minor)
- Users take it upon themselves to reduce the friction of creating a post by only copying the URL into the post, and manually entering a title which may be abbreviated or not accurate. I could reduce this error by extracting the title from the website behind the scenes, and adding an "edit title" feature to edit the post after it's published.