Project Progress (week 10)

During the spring break, I did the first data collection of my project. Although there is just one participant so far, I already got some valuable experiences.

First, I got some advices about the questionnaire design. There are some misleading questions making the participant feel confused and I need to correct them. The misleading questions influenc the participant'sperceptions about the website. He checked the number iondicating high difficulty in the ranking sclae becasue he felt frustrated when searching for the answer. It might cause problems on validity of testing participants' "true" feelings about the website.

Second, there are several serious problems about the website found by the participant which were not found by me when designing the tasks. I am excited to see whether the next participant will find the same problems or some other different issues. I found myself actually "learning" from the subjects.

The first usbility testing took us two hours. It is logner than I expected. One reason is that the participant #1 is not only an experienced web user, but also has experiences of creating website and online database system. He is more sensitive to deficiencies of website design than general users and pointed out many details. The data collected from "thinking aload" is the part I feel the most valuble. The other reason is that he is my friend. So he is willing to spend more time getting familiar the website and trying to find as many problems as possible. This is the advantage to recruit people whom researchers know to be participants.

The participant #1 is not an Engligh native speaker. But I found he doesn't have difficulty to complete the test. So I decide keep using Engligh to do the test even though the participant uses the same mother tongue with me.

Here are just few things I learned from this testing. When I finish transcription, I beleive there will be more ideas coming out.