Testing the user experience 2.0

Back in october when this portfolio was in it’s early days i did a user experience test based on theory from Tom Tullis and Bill Albert (2008). That time the users (some of my fellow students), said that they needed a picture of me on the about page, having some more explaining pictures and having some text behind BIMK, BIID and BFPW in the categories.

I did all these changes along the way, so now some days before the hand-in of the portfolio i chose to do a follow up user experience test with 2 people, that have nothing to do with IT University or what I general talk about here on the site. I did this so that people with no background knowledge instantly will know what my site is about, how to find what they are looking for etc.

After this round of testing my main ‘areas of critique’ were:

• Taking some time to find out what this site is about
• The pictures can be somewhat confusing
• Some minor typo’s

The positive is that the navigation is now improved from last time. It was easy for the one test person to find something about group work with the search tool and via the menu for the other person.
It though looks like i have to make some changes over the next couple of days to improve the natural understanding of the site.

I believe that I have to realize, that my theme is both my biggest strength and weakness. The pictures with hover-on text aspires people to click around and get curious, but at the same time it can be quite confusing for some.

Download:

userexperience (Danish).

Edit:

After a days work on my portfolio i changed the logo, so that the sub-text is orange and therefor is not directly connected to the domain. That is ‘online portfolio’ on the other hand which is the same color as the domain. This is a principle that can refered to the Gestalt laws, where two objects with similar looks will stand out from the third.
Next i changed a lot of the pictures so they fitted the article more. I also put a little wordpress-icon on all those post that have something to do with editing wordpress, so that users quickly can find these specific articles.
I also made a ‘Tags’ page, where the user can quickly find some of the keywords that this site is about and find all the post that have this keyword tagged on it. Where the one user quickly found some group work, the other had to look through the categories, so now they can easily go to the tags page and find group work.

Literature:

Tullis, T. &Albert, B. (2008): Measuring the user experience. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. pp 45-62.
Cooper, A., Reimann, R. & Cronin, D. (2007): About Face. Wiley. pp 287-320.