Create user testing tests and review

[garethrees]

• Create two questions/workflows
• Watch results

[TomSteinberg]

Things you might want to ask users to try include:

• Make a request to a named body (It has to be one on the demo host you use (or the live site if there's a dummy body in there)). This includes confirming their email address.
• Search for some information that you know is there
• Set up an alert
• Send some feedback to the people running the site
• Edit info on their own user page

[garethrees]

USER TESTING OBSERVATIONS

See "Alaveteli User Testing May 2014" on usertesting.com

GENERAL

1. Run one test at a time so you can scrub the data 😳
2. App seems much faster now on most pages 🙆‍♀️
3. Disposable emails confuse some user testers. Oops. 😔
4. One user seemed to think the sample data (Cheap v1agra) was real 🙀

TASK 1: MAKE A REQUEST

HOME PAGE
[/]

No one clicked "Start Now" to make a request (#1496)

SELECTED SEARCH RESULT
[/select_authority]

Confusing that the department appeared on the right hand side; Doesn't look like
the department has been selected. (#1498)

"Make a request to this authority" button looks like a progress bar rather than
a call to action. (Resolved by mysociety/alavetelitheme#12?)

Not sure what the previous requests add to the sidebar. (#1498)

"Only requests made using WhatDoTheyKnow are shown" at the bottom of yellow
sidebar doesn't have any context. (#1497)

NEW REQUEST PAGE
[/new/dfe]

"Possibly related requests" opens and closes – should stay open and update
results if they change to stop it moving the page around (#1499)

"Or search in their website for this information" is a bit confusing. Looks like
it should say "our", but actually uses Google Site Search. (#1503)

Template request body is good. 👍

Might be worth moving the notes under the text box to the bullet list on the
right of the text box so that it doesn't feel surrounded by text. (#1500)

Preview was a little slow 🐢

CONFIRM EMAIL PAGE
[/profile/sign_up]

Good that the app detected email being pasted in to Name field. 👍

Allow user to click through to request on email confirmation, but add notice
to say it will not be sent/published until their account is created? Might
be worth measuring the dropoff here. (#1504)

"Sign out" link in slightly non-standard place.

TASK 2: FOLLOWED REQUESTS

First reviewer went to "My Requests" and was happy that they were the requests
she was following.

Lots of confusion between "View Requests", "My wall" in the user nav and
"View Requests" in the main nav.

Some even went to "My profile" but missed the following section.

Took a while for one reviewer to realise "View Requests" meant "All" requests.
"Browse Requests" might be a better term. (#1505)

Action: Improve the logged in user experience to improve longer term engagement. (#1501)

TASK 3: REQUEST A REVIEW

REQUEST PAGE
[/request/average_class_size]

If a request is long overdue and the user hasn't made any followups the status message prompts the user to request an internal review, rather than first making a followup prompt.

NEW INTERNAL REVIEW PAGE
[/request/116/response?internal_review=1#followup]

User expected details links to open in popup rather than off-site (#1502)

A user can still make an internal review even when the status is "Awaiting Internal Review".

When the status was "awaiting internal review" (after the first tester did this) the other testers were more likely to click "follow up".

TASK 4: EXISTING INFORMATION

No one used the nav search to search for "list of schools"

"Successful" requests is the default selection on the "View Requests" page, so when one user searched it only searched successful requests.

None of the users were confused by "annotation" rather than "comment" 👍

[crowbot]

Closing this as we've watched the testing sessions and the actions have been spun out into other tickets.