Week 5 & 6: Generating Requirements & Prototyping

We had two lectures this week because of the lack of lecture in the previous week. Since we have now formed our group for the client based presentation, had two meetings and started to come up with a plan for the project, it will be possible now to relate the topics to the project as it develops. In the first part of this blog I will bring the reader up to date with my group's progress in the client project. Then I will come back to relate the project to this week's topics.

After two group meetings we have established a number of issues for the project. I was apointed team leader, which involves liasing with the client, organizing meetings and making sure everyone has access to resources and meeting transcripts. In the first meeting we established that we would test users from a theory neutral perspective, and then make our suggested changes based on test results and a more theoretical backbone. In this way, the user would come first (after all this is user centred design) and our research would not be damaged by our own biases at an early stage. After the first meeting we had all realised the large scope of the project and so organized a further meeting a few days later.

In the second meeting we began planning the project in more depth. The first stage of planning involved working out our user demographic and how to test them. For our project we decided that this would be broken down in to three age classes (18-40, 40-60 & 60+) and two gender sub-classes (male and female). For each of the four websites one user particpant from each of the classes will take part in the user tests, giving a total of 6 users for each website (i.e. a male and female from each of the three age classes) and thus 24 in total over the four sites. This user population should give more than enough data to gain some significant insight into usability issues of the websites, although some might argue it would full short of scientific rigour in terms of statistical significance. Unfortunately time constraints mean we must fall short here, but nonethless the results should be valuable. We have rather cleverly got hold of a screen reader so that we will be able to remotely view our users as they navigate the sites. This will also allow us to do things like record the number of clicks and errors etc. Furthermore since this can be done without us being present in the room with the user it will make it easier to get people to participate and will also allow the tests to run in a more natural fashion (i.e. without one of us peering over the user with a notepad). We will speak to participants over skype or mobile phone and guide them through exercises (details to be decided). Following the exercises we will ask them a few related questions in an informal way so as to gain the greatest insights. We believe people do not respond well to overly structured interviews that contain too many specific questions. We will also organize a specialist focus group with around 10-15 foreign students to find out if there are any culture/language barriers the websites need to address. We ideally wanted to do some disability tests as well, but were told this may be very difficult. However our results should lead us onto somthing we can use to develop the changes we see fit.

To go back to the lectures given today there are a number of relations that can be made between the lecture material and the client based project. We will look into detail of the requirements for the website in the near future. We would like to liase with the client to establish if there are any particular requirements they would like to be addressed. We will also work out more requirements (both functional and non-functional) following user tests. In terms of user profiles, potentially anyone could be a user (all ages and abilities) of the Traveline websites and our demographic is intended to represent this. Our reasoning is that 18-40 year olds are mostly familiar with using the web in everyday life, including potentially making travel plans. This is our first user profile. Our second profile 40-60 year olds generally know how to use the web, but are less likely to widely use it, particularly if the web sites are inaccessible or badly designed. Our third profile 60+ did not grow up with the web, nor to many of them use it to plan their everyday lives. We believe this could change if they were shown the huge benefits it can have, and moreover that the sites they use are designed to take into account their usability issues. Finally our foreign student profile should allow us to look into language/culture barriers. These four user profiles will be explained in more detail when the presentation is given to the client. Following the user tests we should also be able to draw up some scenarios and use case examples to demonstrate usability issues encountered. Hierarchical task analysis should allow a systematic break down of the user tasks set and allow us to evaluate user action with more rigour.

In terms of prototyping, it is difficult to say exactly what we will use at this stage. However so far mockup web pages and functional widgets have been suggested, both of which can be demonstrated to the client in the presentation. Our prototypes will follow from a combination of our user results and some expert knowledge / theoretical backbone. This topic will be discussed again in a later blog when the project is further developed.