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The user had no issue with this task - as expected, he went to the Contribute Sentences tab, and inputted a sentence using his computer's Chinese IME, the English translation, and submitted the sentence.
User 3:
This user lived in China until her middle school years. She is fairly proficient in reading Chinese, but she still regularly encounters words she cannot read. Thus, she could benefit from using this application to gain exposure and master more difficult vocabulary, and is thus part of the target user population.
Task 1
The user had no difficulty with this task. She used tab to switch through the fields, and pressed Enter to create her account.
Task 2
The user quickly selected the textbook and chapter from the combobox. However, after doing this, she was at a loss as to what to do. She explored the interface, first checking the "May appear in sentences" checkbox for a few words, then pressing the "Make study focus" button for a few words. She then clicked the buttons controlling the sort options. Then, she fetched a few sentences, but she still (correctly) believed that she hadn't accomplished the task. At this point, she gave up on the task, and we proceeded to the next one.
After the user experiment, we asked the user what the "May appear in sentences" checkbox did, and she indeed had the model of what it did. However, she cited that "Check words below" / "Uncheck words below" buttons were rather far away from the checkboxes that they mainpulated, hence the relation wasn't apparent to her.
Task 3
Upon seeing the word we had asked for, 好, the user remarked that this was a very common word, so the user first began clicking "fetch sentences" repeatedly, knowing that a sentence containing 好 was eventually going to appear. After a few sentences, however, she realized on her own that this wasn't the way we had intended her to accomplish the task, so she clicked on the search box, typed in the pinyin, and pressed the "Make study focus" button for the word, and fetched the sentence.
Task 4
As expected, the user clicked on the word to find out its prononciation and definition via the popup. She then clicked on the "Make study focus" button in the popup to make it the study focus, and fetched a sentence.
Task 5
As expected, the user typed in the pinyin into the search box, and unchecked the "May appear in sentences" checkbox.
Task 6
The user clicked on the "Close" button for the sentence, as expected.
Task 7
The user went to the "Closed Sentences" tab, and clicked the "Restore" button as expected.
Task 8
The user remembered that she had previously fetched a sentence containing 好, and that it was in the "Closed Sentences" tab, so she went to the tab, located the word in the sentence, clicked it, used the "Make study focus" button to make it the study focus. Immediately after she did so, however, her attention was drawn to the top-left side where the study focus had just changed, and she noticed that the widget displaying the study focus was actually a combobox, so she clicked it, saw that the history of study focuses was displayed there, and (correctly) remarked that the way we were probably expecting users to do the task was using that combobox. We thus consider this task to have been completed successfully, as the user was able to discover the intended way to display previous study focuses on her own.
Task 9
The user clicked on the study focus combobox and selected General Review as expected.
Task 10
The user went to the Contribute Sentences tab and contributed a sentence as expected.
Usability Problems Identified during Testing
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