With thousands of potential students descending on campus for our open days last week, we had an ideal opportunity to get out ‘into the wild’ and carry out some guerrilla usability testing on the recently launched study at York pages, our new course pages, and a new homepage design that we’re working on
In guerrilla usability testing there isn’t a recruitment or screening process to find participants, you’re basically walking up to willing-looking strangers and asking if they’ve got a few minutes to spare. The tests can take place anywhere that you can find people - coffee shops, train stations, shopping centres, etc. Open days are ideal because everyone who comes to campus is going to be in our target demographic!
Although guerrilla usability testing is a lot less formal than a lab-style usability test, we still used a script (cribbed from Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy) to make sure that our introductions covered the basics of who we were, what we were doing, how long it would take, and perhaps most importantly, that we would reward participants with chocolate.
Before we got our participants to use the site, we asked them a few questions about the course they were hoping to study and what specific bits of information that they’d look for to help them decide if a course was right for them. We then asked them about other factors that would influence their decision to apply to a particular university. Based on their responses we came up with some scenarios on the fly.
Over the course of the two open days we ran 17 tests, using both laptops and phones. Each test took around 10 minutes.
As well as course information, our participants looked for information on accommodation, the college system, the city, sport, societies and nightlife.
We’ll definitely be doing this again. As well as the value of the testing itself, it’s always great to get out of the office and meet the users of our site.
What’s different about guerrilla testing?
How we did it
Before we got our participants to use the site, we asked them a few questions about the course they were hoping to study and what specific bits of information that they’d look for to help them decide if a course was right for them. We then asked them about other factors that would influence their decision to apply to a particular university. Based on their responses we came up with some scenarios on the fly.
What we tested
As well as course information, our participants looked for information on accommodation, the college system, the city, sport, societies and nightlife.
What we learned
- Everyone likes a Yorkie bar!
- Overall our participants were able to complete all the tasks that we gave them and liked the look of our redeveloped pages.
- It was reassuring to see a lot of our assumptions validated, especially on our new course pages (eg BA Politics) - students found it easy to tell what they’d be studying each year, and really liked seeing authentic quotes from current students.
- We got a lot of positive feedback about the in-progress new homepage design, with students liking how it looked, finding it “professional” and “welcoming”. One area that caused some confusion was the section on research, so we’ll be refining that further to make it clearer.
- We found a few small bugs to fix with how the site works on mobile. It’s on our roadmap to set up a device lab so that we’ll be able to catch things like this sooner.
- Several students used the main site search (rather than the course search) to find courses, which resulted in a much less direct path. There’s some work to be done to see how we can improve that.
We’ll definitely be doing this again. As well as the value of the testing itself, it’s always great to get out of the office and meet the users of our site.
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