Monday, January 21, 2008

Awesome Usability Test

We ran a usability test of the new freshbrain.org on Friday at Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, CA. We had 13 high school age students participate. The usability test ran for just over an hour. The structure was:
  • 8 laptops in a conference room
  • One or mostly two to a laptop
  • Complete three scenarios
    • Register
    • Explore
    • Create a predefined project, their own project and do an activity
  • Provide us feedback after each scenario
  • Provide us with written feedback at the end
The students were AWESOME!! They jumped right in, appeared to totally enjoy the experience and provided us with loads of verbal and non-verbal feedback.

It was amazing how spot on we were. The fact that we built freshbrain.org on a social networking platform was exactly the right choice. They were quick to take advantage of all of the capabilities to share with friends, work together on projects and so on. We also nailed it with the look and feel of the site, the types of technology areas, the types of activities and projects and how we intend to use Advisors.

We did walk away with a number of important enhancement requests. These are mostly building on what we have We will make a couple of changes for this release and the rest on the one planned for March.
  • Enhance search - it is how the students want to find everything.
  • Make tools easier to find and better connected to activities and projects.
  • Provide an internal system (as opposed to email used today) to make and accept friend requests, additions to projects, etc.
  • Improve usability of forums.
  • Extend capabilities of My FreshBrain to show more about friends, their activities, projects and forum entries.
  • Look at adding more non-techie options maybe under Lifestyles (eg. cooking, writing).
  • Provide a more in depth set of steps for projects.
This was all very validating :)

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