[samigo-team] [DG: User Experience] Looking to volunteer some usability testing

[Keli Sato Amann]

Hello David,
This is probably the best place to start, but as you may know, management of Sakai is pretty diffuse, so you won't get one comprehensive response. I am bcc'ing Salwa, Ann, and Whitten, who I know on your campus (maybe they directed you here). Sakai roughly breaks down this way:

1) the Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE), or what most campuses use currently, has a collection of several tools: Announcements, Assignments, Forums, Resources, Tests & Quizzes, etc. There is usually a single school that takes the lead on managing that tool, though many contribute to it. Some of those schools have UX people (designers or business analysts), others do not, so you may want to post follow ups to the Dev list. 

How long is your term? Version 2.9 is going into code freeze tomorrow and entering QA, so I don't think those changes can be user tested and retinkered in response and teams likely haven't started their 2.10 planning. However, 2.10 planning might start up in a few weeks and it might include redoing usability of features introduced in 2.9. It would probably be best if your students could look at 2.9, even though it may be changing in QA, because it may have addressed issues your students would discover in 2.8. nightly2.sakaiproject.org has what will likely go into 2.9 but refreshes every 4 hours so maybe others on the list have suggestions.

The other issue is what functionality would it most worthwhile for students to test. In some ways, they should just work on what has driven them crazy as students--at least they can hold something up to prove it wasn't just them. But it may be that that functionality doesn't have strong ownership, so you might want to propose those areas back to this list, or the dev list, to see if people would actually respond. 

Speaking for Tests & Quizzes which Stanford has traditionally sponsored (leadership on this is getting diffused to samigo-team at collab.sakaiproject.org), we'd be interested in hearing what is difficult to use--we may already know about it, but we don't have a sense on priority and importance. In particular, testing on how instructors find settings, as that is an area we want to redo, as well as question pools.

Stanford would also find it useful to get some testing on Forums, since we are going to be really pushing people to migrate to that this year so we can close our legacy integration with phpBB. We actually tried to recruit some instructors for user testing locally but no bites (maybe we needed cash). We are motivated enough to code, so long as we think it's an issue we are also likely to experience. But there seems to be a lot of people already working on it, so you are likely to get some bites. Bcc'ing Bryan Holladay who seems to be super involved.


2) The Open Academic Environment, or OAE, is the next generation Sakai. It needs user testing,  but those tests have been designed and it's on a tight schedule. However, I am cc'ing Anne-Sophie, in case she has some projects your students can work on.

Best,
Keli Amann
User Experience Specialist
Academic Computing Services, Stanford University
----- Original Message -----
From: "David M Yeats" <dy12 at txstate.edu>
To: sakai-ux at collab.sakaiproject.org
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2011 7:31:52 PM
Subject: [DG: User Experience] Looking to volunteer some usability testing



Hi, 

I'm not sure where to direct this message, so I'll start here. Any comments/suggestions on how to proceed are welcome. 

I'm a professor at Texas State University and I'm teaching a course in User Experience Research Methods to graduate students. I'd like them to complete a real-world usability research project as a part of a team assignment, and I was interested in having them volunteer to work on Sakai. 

What I'd like to propose is that the three student groups in my course complete an end-to-end usability research project for a portion of Sakai that you would like to have tested. There are 11 students in the course, which means that each group has 3-4 students. Rather than simply downloading the materials that you create, I would instead like to see my students work with Sakai UX contributors to develop their own tests (to your specifications), including proposals, test plans, test instruments, etc. They would recruit participants, run the test, and provide a report and data following the test. The students would need to engage on a project that can be completed (with a final report to you) by the end of November. 

If this seems like an interesting thing to pursue, let me know. In addition to being a professor, I am a full-time UX researcher and consultant for companies like Dell, Verizon, and AT&T. However, my doctoral research was about open source software communities and I have a passion for supporting good UX/usability in open source projects. 

thanks, 
Dave 

PS: My class uses a system called TRACS at Texas State, which is powered by Sakai. 

-- 


Dave Yeats, PhD , Adjunct Professor of Technical Communication 
Department of English 
Texas State University at San Marcos 
dy12 at txstate.edu 

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