On Mar 27, 2008, at 9:05 PM, Marijke Rijsberman wrote: > For instance, testing prototypes is not a good way to suss out what > (small?) percentage of people is going to do something like write > reviews, tag their expenses, or do some other "power user" type of > thing which demands a lot more dedication than the average user > would bring to it. That requires a different (and likely more > quantitative) type of research.
Completely disagree. Last year we did several rounds of usability testing for LA Times w/prototypes looking at tagging, reviews, and other social idioms. In fact, the usability testing highlighted something we never would have seen in quantitative research—that while people aren't sure what tags are, the interaction of what a tag does meets their expectation. If we had done a quantitative approach, we would have seen near 0% interaction and based on that would have scrapped tagging, ratings, and reviews from the new Calender Live site. However, with in-person testing, we were able to get feedback from users that showed: 1. Only power-users are likely to migrate to tagging, ratings, and reviews. 2. Power-users are not age-defined. 3. 3-5% of users will rate, tag, or review. 4. Non-power-users were willing and often interested to explore tagging, ratings, and reviews, but sometimes needed some type of prompting. Understanding what kind of prompt they needed helped us engage them in future rounds of testing. Gaining this understanding is only something we could have obtained by in-person discussions, not through a web-survey. 5. Through in-person studies were able to perform some collaborative design with the participants and determine the priority levels of the information on the screen. This lead to design concepts that enabled us to put tags clouds (something that less than 2% of our participants knew what it was) in the appropriate place on the screen so that they were out of the way of those who wouldn't use them, but reachable for those who would. 6. When encouraged to explore tags, every participant who did found them extremely useful and immediately saw the benefit. We didn't explain the benefit and ask them to try them, we simply asked what they expected to happen if they clicked on those "things" and then had them try it out and followed up with "how does that compare to what you expected?" Very vague, but it does the trick w/o leading. Numbers 1-3 could be accomplished w/a quantitative study, but 4-6 took a qualitative study to perform. And frankly, 4-6 were insights that were new, while 1-3 are things we could have learned by googling. Cheers! Todd Zaki Warfel President, Design Researcher Messagefirst | Designing Information. Beautifully. ---------------------------------- Contact Info Voice: (215) 825-7423 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Blog: http://toddwarfel.com ---------------------------------- In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
