For my testing, I set my project up at an event in Bangor that my friend was DJing. I had the honor of showing the project during the performance. I got much feedback from my friends who attended the show. I made sure not to tell them that it was me who created the visualizer beforehand to avoid biased opinions. The results were fantastic. After the show many people were running up to my friend(the DJ) to congratulate him on his performance and ask about the visualizer. They said they had seen nothing like it before and that it was cool.
BetaTestFeedback
Tiny Tactics Beta Feedback
I ran a limited test of the game during several of the CUGR presentations, providing playtests for the random players that took interest. Most expressed interest in the concepts, and a few made suggestions that I might incorporate into gameplay. I observed several players having difficulty with the user interface of the game, and have made notes to fix certain drag-and-drop behaviors and points of confusion.
BetaTest User Feedback
User Testing (Before Feedback)
Ultimately, we want to get feedback from students who would use our site. We want to know which aspects of our website work and which aspects do not work. We want to see what students think about the overall functionality and design of the website. We think the students opinion and feedback is extremely important for our capstone because our capstone is directed towards how students interact with our website.
User Testing (After Feedback)
For our user testing, we set up a table in the Union and advertised our housing website to various students passing by. We created a survey and handed it out to a variety of freshmen and sophomore student. We were able to get a lot of feedback, which we found extremely helpful. Majority of the feedback and suggestions were directed towards fixing the price range slider and adding more reviews. Students also wanted to view more listings and we will be adding more listings in the next week. Positive feedback we received was that our website was aesthetically pleasing, and well designed, making it easy for students to navigate. Throughout the next week, we plan to add more apartment listings that continue to come in. We also plan on adjusting the price range slider, adding new apartment/housing listings, adding reviews from students and photographing head shots of realtors to display on our site.
User Testing Names
Jessica Scott
Sophie McGovern
Katie Pride
Zoe Andle
Heidi Lachance
Ellie Webb
Mike Degou
Daniel Upson
Miles Pretlove
Epitaph – Beta Tester Feedback
Above – comments and suggestions from my testers.
Most suggestions were in the realm of adding more content or taking away the music. A couple suggested I change my WordPress theme. One or two wanted me to change the format completely – saying they would rather have it as a game or a visual novel (go figure) or read it as a novel. I thought that was interesting.
I will be adding more content and doing away with the music. The theme is important to the story. The format cannot be changed but I’m already writing a novel in my spare time, well, I was before capstone – but I will probably continue it post-university.
Beta Test User Feedback
Basically my user testing involved people registering, adding posts, and trying to find things on the website then letting me know what was buggy or not functioning in a well designed way. The feedback was as expected, basically that some of the filtering of posts could be more in depth, images are a little blurry on posts, and single pages need to be better laid out. Positive feedback said that the website was involved and easy to understand and use, however the user search was not working (coming later)
CaitlinTrafton BetaTestFeedback
Get User Feedback.
Fix Facebook Page: Promote it. Get everyone to chose domain name.
Take Poll: How many of you are interested in this subject?
Seafood-Plate
How many of you have heard of Food Drops?
Farmers drop food at public libraries
Farmer’s Market?
Community Supported Agriculture?
Community Supported Fisheries? (CSF)
Fish Shares?
Find a Poll that Takes User through varying stages of questions based on their interest level. Most questions=most interested.
Calender
Feedback
Gathering and presenting feedback
Choosing a sample
Random
Best for performances, installations, and other face-to-face live events.
Accost visitors with a clipboard and pen.
Hand-picked
Best for early tests of an online project.
Actively try to get a representative sample.
Create occasions for testing, eg schedule demos of installations or performances for your classmates.
Mass-invited
For mailed/emailed surveys, expect less than 10% to respond. So if you want 10 responses, you need to contact 100 people.
Requires a lot of promotion.
Scheduling testing
Schedule each phase separately in your Gantt chart:
Pre-alpha phase
About 1-2 weeks of deployment.
3-10 people.
Don’t worry about a representative sample.
Can be friends, roommates, relatives.
Alpha phase
About 1-2 weeks of deployment.
10-20 people.
Draw from classmates, unless they are not a representative sample.
May require throwing out any previously accumulated content.
Beta phase
About 4-8 weeks of promotion, followed by 4-8 weeks of deployment.
Can be shorter for live events.
Should not be friends, roommates, or relatives.
May require throwing out any previously accumulated content.
Postgraduate phase/s
Occur in the year after you graduate.
Goal is not just to improve the project, but also to attract the means to sustain it (funders, advertisers, clients).
Ideally should not require throwing out previous content.
Feedback format
Data types
The more quantitative, the easier it will be to compile statistics. But leave some room for comments if possible, to capture what you didn’t include but is important to your respondents.
Quantitative
Continuous (decimals)
What’s your GPA? (4.0, 3.84, 2.37, …)
Discrete (whole numbers)
How many computers do you own? (1, 2, 3, …)
Qualitative
Ordinal (rank ordered categories)
How much computer experience do you have? (Expert, Moderate, Newbie, …)
Nominal (categories without rank)
What’s your ethnic background? (Latino, White, African-American, …)
Freeform text (comments)
How did you like this course? (“It sucked because…”)
Explaining differences
One of the main purposes of testing is not to come to a single conclusion (“Everyone likes my capstone!”) but to identify and explain differences.
Differences in respondents
Correlate demographic differences with other responses.
Example: A new media installation asks how technically savvy visitors are, to see if that affected their enjoyment of the work.
Differences between versions of the work
Create two versions of the experience and share them with different visitors to test for a preference or demographic disparity (“A/B” testing).
Example: A Web site randomizes which of two versions of its front page visitors see, then logs which spurred more click-throughs to deeper content.
Helpful tools
Online survey sites
SurveyMonkey.com
Doodle.com
Google Charts
Offline applications
Microsoft Excel
Apple Numbers
Onboard surveys
Best for catching users when their experience and motivation is fresh.