Platform research & development
GCshare early prototype usability testing — Part 1
What it looked like
You can also read this article in French.
GCshare will be a public content sharing and discovery platform for open educational resources (OERs) developed by the Educational Technology Research and Innovation team at the Canada School of Public Service in partnership with eCampusOntario.
The platform’s goal is to support the learning professionals in creating quality learning experiences. It is meant to support 2 primary tasks:
- Find learning content to reuse
- Share learning resources with the global learning community
Usability testing objectives
Prior to launching the platform, we wanted to make sure that our users would be able to complete the 2 primary tasks described above. With that in mind, we evaluated:
- Success/failure rate of the tasks
- Time needed to complete the tasks
- Perception of the usability of the interface
- Assumptions related to how people browse and search for content as well as how much effort they are willing to put into describing the resources they share
We also wanted to get a diverse representation for this study, so we asked potential participants to tell us:
- their location by province
- their gender identities
- if they worked for the School (as we wanted to get an outside perspective)
Having limited time for testing, we aimed to test with 5 users and to turn the test around in about a month’s time.
Timelines, resources and methodology
The entire testing process from planning to making changes based on results took about a month based on the workload of 2 employees — a UX Researcher located in the National Capital Region (NCR) and a Manager located in British Columbia. A UX designer located in NCR was also involved as needed prior to testing and more actively after the testing, to redesign parts of the prototype.
What tools we used
- AdobeXD prototype
- Microsoft Forms for screening questionnaire
- School’s System usability scale (SUS) questionnaire in a digital format
- MSTeams to moderate and record usability testing
- Excel and Word document for making notes
What we did
A call for interested participants and a screening questionnaire were shared via:
- GCconnex Heads of Learning Forum (HOLF) community
- Internal mailing list of people who wanted to be included in usability testing
We received 46 expressions of interest in 2 days. So we stopped there. What we observed from the data:
- No one selected genders other than female and male
- The majority of respondents were from Ontario, followed by Quebec, with only a handful from other provinces, with the lowest representation of Western Canada.
Based on this, we made an effort to include as many folks from other provinces as we could, given our timing constraints. In the end, we interviewed 6 participants from 6 different government departments; some were relatively new to the government, while others worked there for many years.
4 participants identified as female and 2 as male, with the following distribution across Canada: 3 Ontario, 1 New Brunswick, 1 Newfoundland and Labrador, 1 Quebec.
Each interview was scheduled for 45 minutes to 1 hour and took place over MSTeams.
Testing structure was as follows:
- Warm up questions
- Completion of 2 tasks
- SUS questionnaire completion
- Follow up questions
The 2 tasks were framed in the following ways to help us assess success:
- Task 1: You are a specialist in accessibility and you have developed a way to assess accessibility in learning products. You think others will find your accessibility checklist useful and you want to share it on this content sharing platform. How would you do that?
- Task 2: You are a learning advisor and you are developing a course related to digital communication. You are on GCshare platform looking for content you could use to develop an effective course. Find a resource that will help you develop this course.
We took detailed notes and then organized them into themes (issues observed). These were then interpreted and converted into actionable changes.
Curious to know what happened next? Hop over to the next article to find out what we discovered and what changes we made as a result!
