Kokovoko Site Redesign: Prototype Testing

Introduction

This report describes a prototype test in support of the redesign of the website for Kokovoko Farm, a small family farm in Harrison County, KY. Kokovoko Farm that runs several businesses. The primary business of the farm is to raise and sell pure-breed and crossbreed Swedish Gotland ponies. Secondary businesses are a bed and breakfast, and the sale of hand-spinning supplies. The current website addresses all three of these businesses, and it is expected that the new website will do this also.

This study does not involve production of a prototype for the entire website; instead it is aimed at evaluating the design of the site from the point of view of a single important sequence of user-tasks, namely: locating information on ponies for sale; evaluating the ponies comparatively, and—should the user be motivated to advance further toward purchase of a pony—locating the farm-owner's contact information.

Methods

I began with wireframes that were designed for the same user task in an earlier ICT 4505 assignment. The wireframes, which were made in Microsoft Power Point, consisted of:

• The Home Page
• The Ponies for Sale Page
• A sample page for a single pony (Kokovoko Peter Pan)
• the Contact Page

I added background color and images to each page, as appropriate. Most text on each page was still in lorem ipaum form. Finally I created additional copies of each page: this was needed in order to create mock-ups that mimic the behavior of a dropdown menu on the main navigation bar. Finally, I uploaded pdf copies of the Power Point Slides to Invision App, an online tool for creating and sharing website protoypes. In Invision App I created hotspots to emulate the behavior of links between all four pages mentioned above. A link to the prototype appears in the Resources section on the right of this page.

Using Survey Monkey, I created a small post-test survey for particpants to fill out. A link to the Survery may be found in the Resources section.

Finally, I chose two participants for our study: both were females and were of age 26 and 63.

Results

Testing

Both participants were able to complete the assgined task within a minute or so. Neither reported significant problems navigating the site. One participant said that she was a bit confused by the presence of nonfunctional links.

Post-Test Survey

One subject found that the images fit well with the site. The other said they were a somewhat poor fit. One subject found the site quite inviting. The other found it neither inviting nor uninviting. Given that the site was only a prototype, I was not surprised by these mixed responses.

Regarding the question about the possible helpfulness of the information that would have been found in the nonfunctional links, it was interesting that one subject believed that information about Spinning would hve been very helpful in completing the assigned task.

Other Feedback

Both participants asked to take a look at the existing Kokovoko Farm website. One of them remarked that she did not much like the color scheme. Both thought that the site navigation was clear, but that sometimes the page content was blocky, meaning, I think, that the information was arranged in somewhat irregular blocks on some pages. The new site will address these problems.

Discussion/Conclusions

The study had two shortcomings, listed below.

• Since the project is a redesign of an already-existing site, I have previously been in the fortunate position of being able to study the find-a-pony user task in some detail in previous elements of the course, most notably in the sections on User Research and Task Models. Unfortunately, performing the second element of the task (evaluation of ponies) is a complex process that requires substantially more specific information than any prototype of a site could ever carry. However, my wireframes from the previous Unit were created for this user task, so I had little choice but to carry them forward into the prototyping phase. Hence I was unable to get as much useful user-feedback from this study as I might have had I been able to study a simpler task.
• In retrospect it turns out to have been a mistake to design wireframes in Microsoft Power Point. It is extraordinarily difficult to convert Power Point wireframes into realistic mock-ups. Addition of meaningful text, in particular, was nearly impossible. In a professional project i would turn to other tools such as OmniGraffe Pro.