Scenarios & Methods Dr.

Will Kurlinkus
Writing Your 3 Scenarios
• Scenarios: Creating realistic brief activities/tasks for
your users to perform during the usability test that
engage the possible errors of the site.
• Start with the goals of the website
• Put those goals in a realistic context: add constraints
• User goal: Browse product offerings and
purchase an item.
• Poor task: Purchase a pair of orange Nike
running shoes.
• Better task: Buy a pair of shoes for under $40.
• Place some kind of realistic emotional/psychological
pressure on your usability subjects. Tell a story.
• Avoid clues in your scenarios. Don’t mention the
names of section of the website or links. Also avoid
having one scenario answer another if possible.
Scenarios
Make the task actionable
• User goal: Find movie and show
times.
• Poor task: You want to see a movie
Sunday afternoon. Go to
www.fandango.com and tell me
where you’d click next.
• Better task: Use www.fandago.com
to find a movie you’d be interested
in seeing on Sunday afternoon.
Avoid Clues/Describing Steps
• User goal: Look up grades.
• Poor task: You want to see the
results of your midterm exams. Go
to the website, sign in, and tell me
where you would click to get your
transcript.
• Better task: Look up the results of
your midterm exams.
Sample Scenario: A Bit
Too Detailed
“The spring semester is coming to a close, and you are
planning on moving to a new house across town with your
4 roommates. Only one of you has your own car, and you
all decide that it would be too much of a hassle and too
much gas money to try and drive back and forth in that
one car. One of you suggests that it would be easier to just
rent a truck for the day to move across town. You
remember your neighbors from back home used to hire
Penske Trucks to move across town to their new home,
and you suggest to the group that they are a reliable
company to rent from. The trouble is, you don’t know
where the nearest truck rental site is near where you live.
Without using the search bar, try and locate what location
you would rent your truck from in your area.”
Other Testing Methods
• In this project you’re required to gather data using a usability test and
think-aloud-protocol scenarios as well as one other method.
• What other methods are available?
1. User led redesign & Crazy 8s: How might users solve your
problems?
2. Contextual inquiry: How does the context of use affect your
design?
3. Write scenarios: have your users write their own scenarios
based on their experiences.
4. Competitor Test: Usability test a competitors website as well
5. Edge User Scenario: Create a scenario for an edge user of your
site and have your users test that out
6. Nav renaming: have your user rename the navigation links to be
more specific
Examine Student
Example
Review: Analyzing Student Sample
• Cover Page is Nice: Features company logo—needs names
• Intro:
• good—really nice job showing me they know the company as well as why people might come to the website.
• Written directly to client and highlights expertise
• I’d like to know a bit more about what is going to be in the document
• User Needs: this page is a bit too blocky—give me some subheadings. The actual descriptions are really nice
though.
• Personas: I’m looking for two personas, following our template, that are a primary and secondary work.
Good explanation of personas each major section should have a kind of one sentence intro like this.
• Flaws analysis: good—image and text driven—written to put user goals first that’s the point. Three part
labeling system. Again, some kind of subheadings or organization would be helpful. You can do multiple
flaws per page or just one flaw per page—it’s up to you, but it has to be use focused and ultimately you need
to analyze three key pages. Good job citing the texts—you need to site one for each page/major flaw.
• Competitor analysis: good one to one comparison—you need to incorporate two competitors but I don’t
need to see both for every flaw.
• Intro to usability testing: explains what a usability test is and why they might benefit from it. I’d like your
scenarios and alt test to be described just a bit more in detail show me the real scenarios. I like that there’s a
few sentences at the end as an outro.