Usability Test 2

Hello! Thanks so much for coming out today. We really appreciate it. How’s your day going?

I work for Wut The Fork, and we’re testing out a new website to find out how well it performs. 

Although this is called a usability test, don’t worry- you are not being tested. We are testing how well the website performs, so you can’t be wrong today.

I want you to know that I am not the designer, so please feel free to speak freely and honestly. 

I encourage you to think out loud. This will help me to understand your thought process better. 

So first, I’m going to have you take a look at the homepage. 

When you first look at this page, what do you think is the site's purpose and the purpose of the business?

What do you think the main sections of the website are?

If you were visiting this site, where would you start? What would you do first?

Q1: If your parents are coming into town and you want to find a restaurant with an outdoor patio, live music and happy hour specials, how would you find your options that meet these criteria?

Q2: Imagine you own a restaurant and would like to create a new business profile on our website. How would you go about doing that?

Q2: Imagine you are a bar owner and you’ve decided to change your happy hour schedule. How would you update that information on our website?

Follow-Up Questions:

*Chance to ask why they did certain things the way they did.

Our site aims to be an all-inclusive resource where people can find all the information they need about bars and restaurants in Columbus using search terms to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Did you understand this purpose after using our site?

Could you foresee any instances where you might need to leave our website to find the information you’re looking for?

Summary of Test Results

Not all of our links are clickable, which may be confusing for the user as several of them are going to be repeating links. More of the links will be clickable in the final prototype

If the user has a specific place in mind then there should be a search bar for them to directly type in a bar/restaurant name rather than going through search terms

If the user does not have a specific location in mind, then they can either use the quick links on the left hand side or the search terms in the main page
Some users were more focused on the side bar than the main search area, me may want to use design/colors etc. to draw more attention to the main search area

Some users indicated that they might want to save locations for later (if they thought the profile was interesting and may want to visit it in the future) or save places that they have been and really liked. We may add a bookmarking feature feature similar to Pinterest or something like that

If the user is a business owner, they may have trouble locating the link to login to change their business profile. We may want to make the link for editing a business profile separate from a general login link so that it is very clear to the user where to go

Usability Testing Plan for Clickable Wireframes

• Where can we find 3-5 individuals to test our website on?
• Because our target demographic mainly includes people our own age, we will likely just ask friends or family to test our website. We could also consider talking to some local restaurant and bar owners to get an idea of the ease of use of our sign up pages for business owners.
  
• How will we solicit people's help?
• We will likely ask a few of our friends in person to test our site. Outside of that, we may send out emails to other students at OSU to see if they would also like to participate in our test.
  
• How has the site changed since our paper-prototype?
• The overall structure of our site has changed very little as compared to our paper prototype.  We still plan to have essentially the same layout structure for our pages that we laid out in the paper prototype. We thought more about the content in each section and we added this content to our click-able prototype. We anticipate that some size changes and slight re-arrangement may be needed once we begin to add more content and images to the pages.
  
• What differences do we foresee in usability testing between the paper wireframe and this current version of our wireframe?
• Because we will be adding more content, such as images and descriptions, to some areas, there may be more information for people to sort though and therefore they may have slightly more difficultly finding what they want. However, we hope to minimize any confusion by creating a fairly clean main page where the main focus is the search feature and by ensuring that any additional content on the front page does not make it too cluttered. 
• We also may also make it more immediately clear what the purpose of the website is by adding more images to the front page and including logos, etc. This will increase ease of use and how quickly the user can find what they are looking for.