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4. This sentence contains 忙. Find out its pronunciation and definition, and find another sentence containing it. (In the event that the displayed sentence didn't contain this word as expected, one of the currently displayed words was used for this task).
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This user grew up in a Chinese-speaking environment, and has basic reading proficiency. He was able to read the sentences that he encountered while doing the tasks for this user test. However, after the user test, when he enabled the remainder of the vocabulary, there were words that he needed to click on to discover their pronunciation and meaning. Hence, the user could benefit from using this application, and thus matches the target audience.
Task 1
The user had no difficulty going to the Create Account tab, entering his username and password (switching between the fields using tab), and having the account created and logged in after pressing enter. The user initially typed the repeat of his password in incorrectly (apparently deliberately), and was pleased to see the immediate feedback that appeared that the entered passwords were different.
Task 2
The user had no difficulty locating and using the Textbook and Chapter selection combo-boxes on the left side. However, after the chapter was selected, the user wasn't entirely sure what to do. He first clicked on the "Displayed" sorting button (which sorts the words according to whether they are allowed to be displayed or not). Then he checked the "May appear in sentences" option for some individual words. At that point he believed he had accomplished the task, and started fetching sentences. After being informed that he hadn't actually accomplished the task, the user noticed the "check all" button and clicked it (which is how we had expected the task to be done).
The user later cited that part of his source of difficulty was that the "May appear in sentences" label was cut off (displaying only "May appear") because the user's browser window was not maximized, and was at the time smaller than the minimum size we had designed for. However, the larger usability issue in this case was that the "check all" button's location did not make it discoverable, or that its label did not carry sufficient information scent.
Task 2
The user first tried pressing Ctrl-F to search for the word using the browser's built-in search. In our case, however, because we had implemented the site using Silverlight not HTML, the browser can't search the page. After noticing that he wasn't running in a maximized mode.'t getting when searching via the browser's built-in search, he quickly switched to the search box. The user didn't have any issues locating the search box or using it. After typing in the pinyin for the word, he found the word in the search results, but initially he checked the "May appear in words" checkbox, and didn't click the "make study focus" button. Only after fetching a few sentences and noticing that the desired word was not present did he focus his attention back to the left sidebar, and clicked the "make" study focus button.
Task 3
user immediately discovered how to sort sentences according to "displayed"
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