Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.

How we do usability testing of the EdWeb development

Yesterday at the Web Publishers Community, I gave a presentation in which I ran through how we manage to squeeze usability testing of the new CMS into each 3 week development burst. It was a preview of an event I’m running later in December which is now open for booking.

The presentation is pretty much the same as what I will run through at the forthcoming event (no doubt I’ll make a few tweaks!) but at the event, we’ll actually do the usability testing observation too.

As you probably know, our CMS development is broken down into 3 week blocks of pretty intense activity (‘iterations’). What you possibly don’t know is that into each of these, I squeeze a 3 hour window in which the team sit together and watch 3 CMS users interact with part of the system. We make our own notes, consolodate using a very simple process and out of the issues we observe agree actions for future iterations.

There’s nothing particularly clever going on here – all based on the work of usability experts Steve Krug and David Travis – just a disciplined process that gets results.

You can find out more detail from my presentation, or better yet come along to the session I’m running on 17 December and take part.

Download my slides from the 4 December Web Publishers Community agenda page 

This session won’t be a demo – it will be the real thing, with our development team in attendance. The only difference being that instead of 6-8 of us taking part, about 20 colleagues from around the University will contribute too.

So by coming along you will:

  • Find out how we’re doing usability testing and why it’s so valuable
  • See how easy it is to do it yourself on your project
  • Get a preview of how homepage management works in EdWeb (as that’s the area of functionality we’ll be looking at)

UPDATE: Booking link removed as event has now happened.

Leave a reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel