User Testing 1
Debrief us on what happened in user testing, including how it might affect your project, and what you plan to do about it. Examine your materials matrix, timeline, and strategies, and then tell us how you plan to adjust your strategies, designs, or deliverables.
What have you learned from your user testing experience? What went wrong? Is there anything you would do differently next time?
From my user testing, I learned that it is important to keep in touch with your target audience to avoid falling into the Curse of Knowledge which is what happens when you are too close to a subject and you expect other people to have the same knowledge level as you. Being in touch with my audience also exposed me to what they really care about. I presented them with prototypes of my website in mobile and desktop form and all three participants showed a lot of interest in the video component that was illustrated on the website but doesn’t yet work. I think that video is one medium that is really important to my target audience and I definitely want to give it a lot of attention as I continue to move through my thesis. I think that next time, I would like to be able to have complete products for my audience to interact with so they can have the full experience because this way, there definitely will be more to talk about.
How might you use your thesis project to tell stories, run experiments, facilitate interactions, entertain people, cajole responses, and link media?
I think that the stories that form part of my thesis are very powerful and there is a really big audience for them. Spending the past week explaining these stories to my participants and event o family members while a Thanksgiving dinner really showed me the interest there is in the history of Puerto Rico and how much this narrative is really missing for a lot of Puerto Ricans. Working with my participants, I realized that there is a special opportunity and interest in Puerto Ricans in the diaspora and I think I want to evaluate how shifting focus to them would work within my project.
Describe the most useful and interesting things you have learned in this module.
The most useful thing I learned in this module is that people are actually interested in my topic. The participants that went through user testing didn’t have complaints about the website except for the parts that were missing because the site is not fully functional, but they definitely missing the history that this project is trying to teach.
