Usability Test of Good Documents 8 users react to the site in April, 1998
Last modified: 10/3/98
We had the good fortune of being able to piggyback a usability test of the Good Documents web site on top of some testing done at Trellix Corporation for version 2.0 of Trellix. The entire report from the test administrator, Julianne, to Dan is posted here. It includes transcripts of the videotapes of the sessions and all the stuff you get in testing that you would like to hide from the outside ("this is dumb", "what is this?", "this isn''t clear", etc.).
This report only covers simple narrative responses (as opposed to performance measurements) focusing on factors that helped or prevented readers from grasping the content.
The reviewers included professional web designers who work on commercial Internet (not INTRAnet) sites, as well as word processing users and professional technical writers. They were chosen for the Trellix test, not the Good Documents test. Some were very critical, others were not. All ran into problems, as you would hope in such a test.
Good Documents is constantly changing, and many of the comments refer to old material on the web site, since we made changes in reaction to this test.
In addition, a major redesign of the web site was done in early October of 1998. The old version (July 1998) is kept on the site at:
This report is being made public to help others understand what one form of usability testing is like and what the reports can be like, and to learn about how they can make their "Tips and Techniques" documents better. Let us know of links to other usability reports, especially on tests of business documents.
