Problem Statement
Many people are computer illiterate, but want to or need to know how to use computers. They are often required for communication, schoolwork, and jobs and present throughout our daily lives, but some people are unaware of the possibilities that computers offer. Resources for new learners are scattered, and other tutorials assume a technical vocabulary that novice users don't have.
Design
Implementation
Evaluation
We presented users with the following Briefing and tasks list, and also had the user explore the site afterwards.
Briefing
You will be using TechWizard, a site designed to help people who aren't good with computers become good with computers.
As TechWizard is still being prototyped, most tutorials aren't yet written. Many buttons on the site will redirect you to a functioning page, don't be alarmed if this happens.
Imagine that you want to learn everything there is to getting an email account and writing emails.
Tasks
Find the first tutorial in the sequence on emails
Read the following tutorials in order
- Choosing a mail client
- Writing a new email
- Using CC and BCC
Pretend you want to learn about the internet and find the category listing.
User 1
User 1 is 50+ and is taking a computer class at a community college. User1 is generally unable to use web browsers and MS Office beyond the basics, but knows what the different applications do. User1 is the type who double clicks everything and is bad at switching between applications.
The user was briefed with the above briefing and then given the first task.
We were pleased that User1 was able to accomplish all the tasks with minimal difficulty and commented that they really enjoyed the simplicity.
One thing we identified from User1 is that there should be some sort of progress bar or progress indicator in the tutorials.
User 2
acronyms / cc and bcc
"kind of busy" -> tabs?
cluttered on ie
previous, not to previous tutorial
back to tutorial list, find where we were
"only 3 facts"
"Next doesn't do anything when I get to the end."
55+,
cronyms / cc and bcc
"kind of busy" -> tabs?
[[cluttered on ie]]
previous, not to previous tutorial
back to tutorial list, find where we were
"only 3 facts"
"Next doesn't do anything when I get to the end."
User 3
User 3 is an M.D. who works at an administrative level in his Department at the County.
User 3 is reasonably competent with computers, but has issues with things he has never seen before and seemed like a good member of the target population that was much more competent than User 1 and User 2.
User 3 jumped straight to the correct category and tutorial and was able to find the tutorials asked for fairly quickly. They did stumble when trying to find out about internet, instead checking the email tutorial category listing exhaustively before going back to TechWizard home. However, they may have been trying to be extra pedantic given that they were "user testing."
User 3 likes the layout and relative simplicity of each page. However, they disliked the technical terms such as "Mail Client", suggesting "client" should be replaced by "provider" or another more identifiable term, and the technical term be placed in parenthesis near by. The buttons for the tutorials, while big and easy to see, did not immediately suggest to them that one was a heading and one was a link to another location.
Reflection
We found the canned prototype to be incredibly useful. Paper prototyping was a cool technique to learn
User testing the prototypes also rapidly revealed design issues that we hadn't though of, in particular many things seemed obvious to users that were not obvious to us.