Mumboe’s Discoverability Discovery

October 31st, 2008 Author: wmeurer

We just finished conducting a usability study of the administration (admin) area of the Mumboe application. The admin area includes features like adding users, upgrading, and customizing agreement types and agreement fields. We tested 6 participants and got a lot of great feedback and results.

The most pertinent finding was low discoverability for admin features. Participants were largely successful completing tasks but had difficulty finding where they needed to go to get to admin features. Improving discoverability of admin features will require a combination of solutions, but one method we have used to begin this effort is observing the paths our participants took looking for these admin features.

A professor of mine at the UT Austin School of Information told me a story of a university planning committee that needed sidewalks put in a new area of campus, but the committee didn’t know where best to put those sidewalks. They decided not to create the paths for the students, but rather wait and see where students wore paths into the grass and then build the sidewalks there.

Likewise, we watched multiple participants going down the same fruitless paths, looking on the same pages, trying to find features they needed to complete the tasks. Taking into account potential biases and considering related use cases, these observations helped us identify places in the application where crosslinking to admin tasks could very well improve admin feature discovery.

We’re working on sweeping changes in the user interface in the coming months, during which we plan to implement these and other usability enhancements.

Entry Filed under: User Interface