User testing plan outline: future students

The focus of this test plan is on study areas and navigation.

Based on meeting of Friday, 26 June, with Andrew Bredenkamp, Joe Lobotka (Unlicensed), Paul Seiler (Unlicensed) and Sam Motion (Unlicensed); and a follow up meeting on Tuesday, 30 June with the whole gang (minus Chrissi)

We want to know/outcomes

1. How students approach finding information about what they want to study (e.g. browse, search (from google or internal)
2. How decisions are influenced by whether the student has some idea of what they want to do at university or not.
3. How the terms in the current IA compare to the proposed new ones.
4. Which terms students recognise and which don't make sense to them .
5. How well our subject groupings work. We hope to see evidence that our approach would work better 

Questionnaire

The below plan is written for a one-on-one or very small group testing situation. It comprises a set of core questions, which are worded to avoid leading the student to one particular answer through language.

In one-on-one situations, the interviewer should:

• encourage the student to talk about the decisions they are making
• ask questions about what words mean to the student and why they chose certain options.

1. Do you have some idea of what you’d like to do at university, or careers that interest you?

Purpose: Set up for test outcome 2. May also give us some terminology insight around specific subjects/programmes and careers. If hey have no idea, follow up by asking what subjects they like at school and choosing one of those areas to follow up on. 

2. [With blank browser tab open] 

Let's say you wanted to see what Victoria has to offer in that area. Show me what you'd do. 

Purpose: Test outcome 1. Note if the student starts at a search engine, what they search (Victoria? Programme? Career? Subject? Course?) Try not to guide them too much in the way that they find Victoria. if doing terminology questions after this question, it would be good to stop them before they get too far into the site, as we don’t want the current options to bias answers about future options.

4. High level navigation options.

It would be good to have these questions asked before the user has had too much time to look around the site, to avoid prejudicing their answers towards the current terms. 

Note: these are a mix of current wording options and proposed future options. Options that don’t directly relate to this audience and these questions have been removed. Any that might cause confusion have been retained. 

4a. If you were trying to decide what to do at University, where do you think you’d find information about what Victoria offers? Why? If they pick search, ask them to pick a second option too.

4b. Which would you pick if you wanted to enrol? Why?

Purpose: Test outcomes 1, 3, 4. 

5. Read the following options. Which one would you select if you were exploring what to do at University?

Purpose: Test outcome 4

6. The next exercise is about seeing how easy it is for you to find information about a particular subject we offer at Victoria.  We have an online tool for this. 

Bring up the treejack test. (URL will be: https://victoria.optimalworkshop.com/treejack/july-subjects we should have this open in a different window or tag). 

The participant just needs to put in their name (so we can match their results to other notes later). 

They will see some visual instructions on how to do the task. 

The questions have been loaded into the tool, so the interviewer can read them as they come up. 

6a. Earlier we talked about things you might be interested in studying. Where would you find information about that?

They see the list of 15 top-level areas and work though the navigation to find the thing they want. When they find it, they can hit a button called "I'd find it here".

6b. Let's try another subject you're interested in. Where would you find information about that?

Same action as above. I have made this task 'skipable' so if time is short you can move past it and close the tool.