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Data Collection Sheet

Judy's Book Usability Study
As part of quarter-long project for Technical Communications 517 taught by Jenny Blackburn of Click User Experience, each group performed an ongoing series of usability tests for a client of a local business. My group studied JudysBook.com, a business review site. Together my group studied seven various users, and I personally administrated in three usability sessions. After compiling the data, we found strong evidence that obstacles in the signup process and review submission process were indeed stopping users entirely.



Judy's Book site

Participant Profile

Verbatim Quotes about problems

Objective of the course

The purpose of the usability study is to investigate JudysBook.com, which is a one-stop shop website for writing and reading reviews of local business favorites. The website is based on the idea of a trusted person providing recommendations on services to a shopper so that the shopper has confidence that he/she is choosing an appropriate and reliable business.

Our client was Mike Ma, who is the owner of Judy's Book. His main goal is to accumulate more high fidelity reviews written by people in their mid 20's to late 30's. He wants to encourage such users to share reviews in the most painless and easiest way possible.
Out of this, our groups goal for the usability studies was to discover any hindrance that deterred users from a transitioning from a review-reading role to a more active, review-writing role. More specifically, we studied the new-member signup process and the review writing process.

How it was executed

We first went after recruiting participants that fell within the target user group. I created a user profile to better match up the people that the site catered to and screen out those that don't match. While recruiting participants, we were also crafting scenarios for the user to follow through during the usability study, and creating research questions to better illuminate what the user is experiencing when using the site.

With our test kit complete and our participants recruited, we went about performing the usability studies. Approximately half of them where in the user's own house, with the other half being at office locations. During the studies, we recorded both their screen and their facial expressions and took note of all reactions and comments they made. We took careful note of what they clicked, where they paused, the concerns they voiced and all results of them using the website.

When we had completed all studies, we collected the data together to find patterns in the obstacles participants encountered. Luckily for us — though bad news for Judy's Book — there were several strong patterns that enabled us to recommend for their consideration various areas that need redesign.

(All data shown here is anonymized)


Professors and Colleagues

Jenny Blackburn — Professor, Founder of Click User Experience Christina Young Ralph Lunt Babi Velho Barreto