Testing the comment feature in the new programme editorial interface
I recently ran an open invite usability review for our latest round of usability testing. Normally I run these sessions within our team, but we wanted to involve colleagues across the University in our work to improve the editorial experience. It was also an opportunity for school editors to see the new degree programme editorial interface that they will be using from early this year.
About the session
Our collaborative usability test review sessions follow a standard approach that we’ve been using within our team throughout our project, and that others have been using for some years now.
Each session involves:
- Getting the right people in the room
- Watching videos of representative users completing representative tasks
- Prioritising the usability issues we see
- Collaboratively consolidating our priority lists
Learn more: my blog about how I run collaborative usability test reviews
The session involved colleagues who attended in-person and online. The majority of which were either:
- People who edit programme content on the degree finder currently or who have a student recruitment marketing responsibility
- Members of the Website and Communications team who have been building the EdWeb2 content management system
- Members of our team who attend these sessions regularly
My open invite blog to promote the session
In this round our focus was on the new comment feature in the editorial interface. We wanted to learn if this feature effectively supports school editors to communicate changes to their programme content with other colleagues ensuring that is up to date.
We tested with 5 UG school editors.
What we learned from our last round of usability testing with school editors
What we learned from this session
We intentionally did not give any guidance in advance to participants as we wanted to learn how intuitive the comment feature was for someone with experience of editing content in the current interface.
Creating a new comment: We asked school editors to use the comment feature to request or query updates to their content.
There was some confusion because the add comment button was greyed out and it wasn’t immediately apparent that text needed to be highlighted to activate the button.
It wasn’t clear what the revision log message box was for in the interface and some school editors left an instruction in it for their content to be updated instead of using the comment feature.
Finding comments and responding to them: We asked school editors to find comments left by other colleagues and follow any instructions given.
School editors could not identify the name of the person who left a live comment. This was only possible by accessing the comment archive.
School editors did not immediately spot the comment archive or know what it was for.
There was no easy way to know if a section had a live comment attached to it – school editors had to scroll through each section of the interface to find them.
When the highlighted text attached to a comment was deleted the comment also disappeared – it wasn’t clear that the comment had moved to the archive.
There is no visual indicator that a section has resolved comments – school editors did not know resolved comments were located in the comment archive and to find them required scrolling through different sections if they didn’t know which one it was in.
What happens next?
The usability issues we observed and prioritised in the session help our content operations team develop the right training and guidance materials to ensure school editors will be well supported when the new service goes live.
What attendees said about the session
I would definitely recommend attending these sessions. It’s a great way see how things are evolving and get a peek at the new tools we will be using. The best part is being able to collaborate and contribute with colleagues who actually use the degree finder. Watching videos of users is a really insightful way to gain a better understanding of areas that can be improved. Thanks for organising these sessions!
– Martin Boddie: Head of Marketing, Student Recruitment and Communication, School of Chemistry
Get involved
We are always looking for participants to test with so if you want to get involved with future usability testing sessions then please do get in touch and let me know.
Register interest in helping us with future usability testing
