This was the final week for Usability I. Our Final Report is due by midnight. I’ve already submitted mine. I was, coincidentally, on vacation for the past three days. Good thing too. Based on looking at the assignment requirements I didn’t expect it to take long to complete since a large portion of the report is comprised of documents we’ve already assembled throughout the course. But, as my wife strolled on the beach, I found myself in the hotel room for three eight to 10 hour days, listening and watching all the participant videos, trying to decide which tasks to measure and how to document everything.
I really enjoyed it and find it a bit strange and surprising that I didn’t resent missing out on my vacation. I must (finally) be studying the right field.
After watching all of the videos posted by other students and seeing where the pain points were, I decided to try and stick with the same demographic (novice user) that my team had been assigned to. I was able to find five novice user videos and decided that the most important thing for someone who had never ordered pizza online was, well, to be able to place an order online. Papajohns.com’s Order Now button is very well placed and sized for just such a task and participants had no trouble finding and using the button.
The second task I chose to analyze was ordering a specialty pizza. This task contrasted well with the first because it was difficult for most participants who tried to follow the instructions literally. This is because there is no label on papajohns.com that says “Specialty Pizzas”. This was a good example of making sure that your labels match your customers mental models. In this case I don’t think customers come to the site wanting to order a “specialty pizza”, rather they have a specific pizza in mind or they can get suggestions from the site itself.
Overall a really good final assignment to pull together a lot of what we’ve learned over the past seven weeks.
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