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Paul Mirocha UX Design

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Usability testing Video

Downloading a document: How hard could it be?

This was an early prototype with known problems, and several concepts the developers wanted to test with users. So there are lots of problems to find.

Participant: Program director for the John McCain National Center for Environmental Conflict Resolution.

Her scenario: I want to compare government agency cooperation and public engagement practices for several wind energy projects.

This 2.5 minute video clip from a 1.5-hour usability walkthrough interview shows how many usability issues this format can uncover in a short time. Her search query was simple, but the interface was confusing her.

 

Watch the video

I love doing these usability interviews. Poring over the videos is like a treasure hunt. I learn about friction and wrong ideas within the interface, that I would not have thought of in my own mind. The same goes for the needs and goals of the site user trying to do their job better.

Here are some of the many issues found within a couple of minutes of observing a user searching for multiple environmental impact statements dealing with wind energy projects.

1. Multiple search types.There are three kinds of search in the interface. People didn’t understand what each of them did. All were confused. Developers wanted to know if/how people would use them.

  1. default search, which is the developer’s label for title-only search. It only finds words in the title. No one else  knows what that means
  2. full-text search. It’s descriptive, but still has to be explained
  3. advanced search. This showed options like date range, state, document type, and agency. 
The advanced search form

2. The title similarity tool: It was a sophisticated tool designed by the developers to find similar documents based on words in the titles, meaning draft, final, etc. within the same project.

  • No one understood what it was for. “A lower percentage yields more results.” What?
  • In this video she mistakes the similarity results for a download link for the project she selected, not realizing it was a different, but, similar project.
  • We scrapped this tool. One participant called it “useless.” It would find similar documents because they had some of the same words in the title. But, the words in the title were not always meaningful for making a match.
The title similarity tool

3. the table format used for search results was good for finding an individual project, but a lot of work to browse through. In the video we can see she spends a lot of time scrolling up and down in the table.

The table format for search results

Fitts’ Law

This is an example of how the user behavior followed a common web design “law.” The eye fixates on the most prominent or largest visual element on a page. In this case it led to her making a mistake.

Results

  1. Single combined search. We hid the complexity, leaving “title-only” search as an option.
  2. Advanced search were moved to filters in left sidebar.
  3. Search results. We collected related documents, grouping them in a card for each project, replacing the table format.

A later iteration of the same screen

Revised search screen based on user testing