1 / 13

Usability Assessment

Usability Assessment. LBSC 690 Mark R. Walters. Background. Visitpa.com is the official tourism web site for the state of Pennsylvania. The target user group are people who plan to vacation or spend time in PA

orde
Download Presentation

Usability Assessment

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Usability Assessment LBSC 690 Mark R. Walters

  2. Background • Visitpa.com is the official tourism web site for the state of Pennsylvania. • The target user group are people who plan to vacation or spend time in PA • The target user group wants to find out what there is to do, what places there are to stay, and what are places they would want to visit in PA.

  3. The Tasks • Task 1: Find a place outside of Philadelphia where you can go fishing and horseback riding. • Task 2: Find a flea market in PA Dutch Country that is open year round. • Task 3: Find a place to stay that is less than 3 miles from Fallingwater

  4. Website Testers • User A: Male, late 40s, on average uses web 3-4 hours per day • User B: Female, mid-forties, primarily uses web to meet specific information needs using Google (30 minutes per day on average) • User C: Male, late-forties, on average uses web 1 hour per day • All users spent most of their lives living in Maryland

  5. Task 1: Find a place outside of Philadelphia where you can go fishing and horseback riding. • User A: Relied on an interactive map to select region and sorted by “fishing.” Interface only allows selection of one activity. Randomly clicked on this subset of dots that linked to Visitpa.com descriptions of places to see if horseback riding was also an activity at that place. Completed task in 4 min., 48 sec. • User B: Followed User A’s approach but chose city instead of region initially. Used web site search engine but user found results unhelpful. She stated that she didn’t know what was near Philadelphia. Eventually sorted by region and “horseback riding,” and read through descriptions for fishing. Completed task in 7 min., 5 sec. • User C: Perused web site for some time before deciding not to use the interactive map. Used sort feature on home page for “Things to do.” This sorting feature allowed both “fishing” and “horseback riding” to be selected to generate a list of places in the region. Completed task in 6 min., 29 sec.

  6. Task 2: Find a flea market in PA Dutch Country that is open year round. • User A: Used interactive map to select region and activity. Randomly clicked on this subset of dots to read if places were open year round. Went to external home pages of sites. Eventually clicked on dot that provided information. Completion time: 12 min., 43 sec • User B: Performed key word search. Completion time: 1 min. 46 sec. • User C: Had difficulty determining how a flea market would be classified (“activity,” “event,” “shopping?”) and switched back and forth between the website search and the events search. Did not complete task.

  7. Task 3: Find a place to stay that is less than 3 miles from Fallingwater • User A: Keyword search took user to Visitpa.com web page for Fallingwater. Places to stay and distances provided. Completion time: 1 min. 27 sec. • User B: Same as User A but overlooked that information was on web page. After trying links that took her off site she revisited this web page and found the information. Completion time: 6 min. 41 sec. • User C: Same as User A except read through initial page of results first. Completion time 2 min. 54 sec.

  8. Positives “Things to Do” Dropdown menus accessed from home page enables user to select multiple “Regions,” “Cities and Towns,” and “Activities.”

  9. Positives (cont.) Search by keyword without needing to employ search engine strategies (e.g. use of Boolean operators) limits results to best matches (first 3 links are correct for task 2).

  10. Positives (cont.) Searches for well-known attractions takes the user to the Visitpa.com web page on the site which includes information on places to stay and the distances from the site.

  11. Negatives Results from sorting using “Things to do” does not always bring up all of the results meeting the criteria specified by the user. In this case, two other flea markets in PA Dutch country are open year-round according to the descriptions for them on Visitpa.com web pages. Better tagging would fix this. Also, although it not intuitive to the user that “open year-round” would be found under “General Information,” I’m not sure if a renamed or separate descriptor is warranted.

  12. Negatives (cont.) Cannot select more than one subcategory (e.g. “Fishing” and “Horseback Riding” for “Outdoor Recreation”) when trying to identify a place that that meets multiple criteria when using the interactive map on the “Destinations” tab. The “Things to Do” sort feature that permits this should be part a sort feature for this page.

  13. Negatives (cont.) Once a dot is clicked on, a link appears that takes the user to the Visitpa.com page for the activity. However, once the user tries to return to the prior screen, the criteria has to be re-selected (e.g. Shopping -> Flea Market) for the dots to reappear. The selection criteria is not saved. Perhaps another hyperlink can be added to the home path, such as “saved search?”

More Related