Theme Focus: Usability [part 3]

This is the final part of my theme focus on usability and it's a treasure trove of blogposts and reports which have been written by the good folks at the University of Edinburgh. There are officially two Edinburgh Uni projects within the JISC LMS programme {#AQUABROWSERUX and #ENCLAVELMS} but they are also running the #UX2 project so I've included things of interest from that project too.

It's a bit hard to know how to structure this post so that it doesn't get a tad confusing but here goes ...

This blogpost gives an overview of the thinking behind the user testing and user centred design approach being taken for the UX2.0 and AquaBrowser projects.

As well as sharing their step-by-step guides for developing your own user personas the team have also published their own user personas for you to compare and contrast to yours:
- UX2.0 / AQUABROWSERUX User Personas
- [Part 1] User Research and Persona Creation: Data Gathering Methods
- [Part 2] User Research and Persona Creation: Segmentation – Six Steps to our Qualitative Personas
- [Part 3] User Research and Persona Creation: Introducing the Personas

The #AQUABROWSERUX project produced a full report on their usability testing. It has some particularly interesting findings around the usability (or lack thereof) of the AquaBrowser wordcloud and how useful the participants found being able to view a book's table of contents in helping them decide whether they'd found a book that would be useful for their studies. They also posted videos showing highlights of the user testing:
Video 1: Faceted Navigation
Video 2: Information Seeking
Video 3: Word Cloud

The project team have taken a very reflective approach to their usability testing so there's lots of lessons learnt to dig through:
- Recruitment evaluation and screening for personas
- Realism in testing search interfaces
- SWOT analysis of the persona research phase of the project (which also contains a link to their interview script)

Boon Low's guide to 'in the wild' usability evaluations also makes for good reading.

The #ENCLAVELMS project produced some useful analyses of the UX2.0 and AquaBrowser usability test resport as part of their Work Package 1 Report [pdf].

I don't feel like I can really hope to do justice to all that the project teams have managed to produce so I'd encourage you to have a dig around on the UX2.0 wiki for other hidden gems. The full usability report [pdf] from the UX2.0 project would also be a good place to start.