Jan 30
Met Eireann Redesign — Part 4: Testing & Evaluation
This blog will cover the testing portion of the project, the lead on which was undertaken by myself. It also covers the changes that we made to the prototype following our testing.
Testing Methodology
The testing methodology consisted of the following key steps.
Pre-test questions
The pre-test questions were a series of simple questions devised to get the user talking during the testing process and also to gather some basic demographic information, whilst we didn’t test a large data set this was useful nonetheless to establish best practice.
Plan
The general plan of the testing procedure was as follows; Pre-test questions, Give User Task and ask them to complete it, repeat as necessary until each task was completed. If the user was unable to complete the task we decided on a case by case basis whether or not to give them a prompt in order to allow them to complete the task. Once the tasks portion of the test was completed we asks the user some post-test questions. These questions were primarily qualitative in nature, questions like “What did you think of that task?” or “You struggled at this point, why was that?”. We also asked for any general feedback that the users might have.
Post Test SUS Questionnaire
We also followed up the test with a short post test questionnaire using the SUS questionnaire. We used this to gather quantitative data on the usability of our app.
The results of the post test questionnaire were generally positive with the majority of users agreeing that the system was generally easy to use.
Key Pain Points
The primary key pain point that users struggled with was the searching functionality from the homepage. We revised this element and performed a short unmoderated test using the Maze platform.
The results from the maze test were overwhelmingly positive, all participants being able to complete the task at hand.
References
