Weeknotes, 10 July
Updates Updates
The goal of the week was to go deep into research. Sazia has immersed herself in the results of our user research. Marie in Content Management Systems (CMSes). This is how they got on…
Identifying patterns
We did play ‘spot the difference’ on our daily video-call stand-ups, pointing out any differences we spotted in people’s rooms. But that’s not really what I meant by identifying patterns. Sazia has been collating and analysing all the responses from our user research. By grouping the responses into similar points, patterns of behaviours and successes and frustrations emerge. These will be invaluable to help inform the changes we’ll be recommending to the IA - to better meet user needs.
Testing the navigation
Sazia also set up a test of the current site’s navigation on Treejack. The purpose is to see how easy it is for users to find the information they are looking for on the site today. Then once we make recommendations on how to improve the site IA, we can test again. If we get it right, the results of the test should show an improvement.
How did we do it? We recruited users who are not too familiar with the W3C website and asked them to complete certain goals, such as:
“You’re designing for a target audience based in the middle east, the site will need to translate for both English and Arabic. English is written left-to-right. Arabic is written right-to-left. You have not designed for this type of user before so you are looking to learn how best to do this. Where would you expect to find guidance on this?”
Users then have to navigate through the site headings to the section they think is most likely to have this information. The results show if people:
- took the right path to the content
- took a direct or indirect path
- how long it takes to find the content
- or if they didn’t manage to find it at all
We’re all looking forward to seeing the full results next week!
Sussing out a CMS
Marie has started her investigation into the three CMS options we are considering. She started with a review of WordPress and today has moved onto looking into Statamic.
Final thoughts
What was good: seeing results from the Treejack testing coming in. The results are fascinating.
What we found challenging: I never thought my risk register would include a pandemic, but it does. We are a small team of experts; if someone takes unplanned leave we can’t readily bring in someone else to replace them. In normal times, unplanned leave would normally be for a few days. These days, it could be a minimum of two weeks. So it’s been added to our risk register. We talked about it with Coralie and agreed that if someone needs to take leave we will deal with it on a case-by-case basis, to review the project impact and decide the best way to proceed.
What are we looking forward to: reviewing the user research to narrow down what is in-scope for this project, working on recommending a new site map and finding out which CMS Marie recommends for the job and why.