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Understanding your audience is key to creating effective technical communication. Usability is more commonly used for designers and developers in the tech industry, but it is relevant to the technical communicator as well.
To fully understand my user I focus on their needs, motivations, and thought processes. Usability testing evaluates a design the using Quesenbery's five E's of usability: effective, efficient, easy-to-learn, error-tolerant, and engaging.
See how I used audience analysis and usability testing to improve UA Little Rock's library website.
Usability Testing and Design
Usability Testing and Design
During my last semester of undergrad in Spring 2017, I took Usability Testing and Design. Even though this class was taken at the undergraduate level I have continued to build upon the knowledge I gained from conducting a usability study. We tested the usability of the Ottenheimer Library's website.
Our users were split into three main groups: faculty, grad, and undergrad students. We were concerned with how well students navigated research tools and databases, so we created common scenarios and tasks for the test users based on those areas. We were also concerned with the use of library jargon, so we developed a pre-test questionnaire that specifically asked about terminology.
Our data consisted of user completion rate, time taken on the task, insight from users' think-aloud process, and a pre-test and post-test with reaction cards. To analyze the data each team member made notes on each user's video. From those notes, we all performed a type of cluster criticism noting the connections of main ideas and important quotes from the users. We then met as a group to determine what data was useful and what wasn't based on outliers. After the analysis was completed we presented the data to the library staff to discuss specific areas for improvement.
Below is our complete usability report. In the report you will see the planning and development of our usability test including user personas, user tasks and scenarios, our moderator script, as well as the results of our test.
Note: Video consent forms were removed from the appendix for privacy reasons.
Copy of Final Report(with consent forms removed).pdfReport abuse