Week 9: More Usability Testing

I decided to work through spring break so that I could finish up this project sooner and have more time to work on my poster.  This week, I conducted two more usability tests, this time with internal OT employees who have a lot of experience with another content management system but have only taken the training for WEM (our team is actually in the process of setting up a new instance of WEM so that they can start using it for part of the corporate website).  These are people I have worked with a little, remotely, and only met once in December so it was still comfortable because they weren't total strangers like my next round of participants. During the first test, my WebEx account wasn't working so I got to experience troubleshooting technical difficulties on my feet. Thankfully, I had a back up plan and we used the free screen sharing tool join.me.

One of the more interesting observations from my first participant this week was his confusion about "where he was in the system" when he added a new content item and then again when I asked him to add a new folder. It was almost like the OS metaphor went too far because he thought he was somewhere within the folder structure when actually he was outside of it, like when you're saving a new Word document and you have to choose where to save it. I wonder if in the CMS the Marketing team is currently using, they can only create content while inside a folder. You certainly have that option in WEM too, but it's not required.  He also really wanted the add folder (and add channel) options to be available from contextual right-click menus. He really did not like the button placement for these options. Based on this feedback, I do think the add folder and add channel buttons should always be active (right now the buttons become enabled only if the user has highlighted an existing folder or channel, and so the new container would be created as a child). Since there is an option to choose the placement of the new container from within the creation screen, I see no reason why the add option should not always be available; this would also allow users to be able to create new containers at the root level.

Nothing terribly exciting happened this week and I don't  have any new designs or demonstrations, so instead I leave you with a song.  I first heard this three years ago during my first semester of grad school and I listened to it over and over on the Friday during spring break as I tried to write a paper for the Understanding and Serving Users course. I hope you enjoy Okkervil River, "Unless It's Kicks."