ABOUT THE PROJECT
Overview
Medieval Londoners website is dedicated to medieval London and its inhabitants. Website content includes various resources to study the history of medieval London and Londoners such as chronicles, archives, maps, coins, heraldry, wills, religion, finance and taxes, law and more.
The study utilized a User Testing method which was chosen to evaluate how effectively users of the website might be able to perform specific tasks on the website.
My Role
My major contributions in the project are defining the methodology, facilitating user testing sessions & analysis of the results.
Team
Aimen Awan, Tian Jing, Seth Crider, Elena Korshakova
Duration
Feb 2019 - May 2019
THE CHALLENGE
Identify possible usability issues, and suggest recommendations to improve the overall user experience for Medieval Lonodor's users.
OUR APPROACH
Research on Medieval Londoners
Designed
Test Plan
Recruited
Participants
Conducted User Testing
Data Analysis &
Brainstorming
Recommendations
PROCEDURE
Testing included five tasks regarding the website navigation, database filters, and additional resources search. The tasks were accommodated with a post-task questionnaire for the users to answer, in order to retrieve additional valuable information. Once the results were retrieved, the data were analyzed in order to generate recommendations on how to possibly improve the website.
PARTICIPANTS
Our team recruited a total of 12 participants. The participants proved to be vital in attaining real user feedback for the Medieval Londoners Website. In order to accurately reflect the type of individual who would use the site, the participants were selected after the experts reviewed their pre-screening questionnaires and matched their profiles to the sites, 5 target users. Since the site is heavily oriented in historical and humanities research we wanted the participants to be well educated; preferably in a post grad path focused on history, population studies, data, or mapping.
USER TESTING
Scenario
“You are a researcher at Pratt. You are interested in public office holders within the normal population of medieval London for a project. You have heard about a website offering extensive information/resources based on your research topic.”
Tasks
The following questions were designed to provide the usability experts with enough
feedback to form a general idea about some issues of the current Medieval Londoners
website. In between task completion users were prompted to score the difficulty of
their experience on a scale from 1 (Very hard) to 5 (Very Easy).
1. Before you do any further research, you may want to know if the information
is trustworthy or not. Please find out where the information from this site is
coming from.
2. After looking at the database, you wonder how many collections comprise its
contents. Can you name one collection and how many records it contains?
3. You are interested in finding literary resources related to early English drama.
Please find the name of a database with information about performances.
4. You want to know more about the mayors of London. Is there an outside
source you can find within the site that would help you?
5. Can you find how many Sheriff’s there were between the year 1400-1420?
USABILITY REPORT
Our team found the ambition and scope of the site to be encouraging as its progress will
expand the canon of historical resources for students, professionals, and researchers
alike. Although the site is in its beta phase users could see the potential of Medieval
Londoners and the amenities it has to offer. The following recommendations are issued
in hopes of showcasing the resource, and its contents to future researchers and
students alike.