Re: Grouping and Chunking -- Jared Spool

At 2000-07-24 09:58-0400, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>Harvey,
>
>Thanks much for those guidelines.  They look quite useful.
>
>Just one question .. did he based these guidelines on data,

Yes.

>and show the relation to the data, or are these based on his experience 
>and intuition?

Design of tasks was from his experience and intuition (see below)


>Len
>
>
>
>At 01:26 AM 7/24/00 -0400, Harvey Bingham wrote:
>>Jared Spool, in Web Site Usability, A Designer's Guide, copyright 1999
>>Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc, ISBN 1-55860-569-X


By the way, Jared was the principal investigator. He has four co-authors:
Tara Scanlon, Will Schroeder, Carolyn Snyder, and Terri DeAngelo, all
from Jared's company: User Interface Engineering.

Jared's method:

1. Select some 11 "general interest" sites.

2. Identify for each a small set of questions for users to find answers. The
questions were not answerable from the home page. Questions had factual
answers available on the site.

3. Pre-test with experienced web users.

4. Select a set of users (number and a priori skills undefined other than at
least 2 weeks to several years internet browser use experience, with 
current use
less than an hour per week to four hours per day.)

5. Each user was given a differently ordered list of the sites and tasked 
to find
answer to the questions for each site. Each was asked to get as far as they
could through those questions. No user got through all the sites.

6. Users were tested for 3 hours, working alone, with minimal interaction with
staff. After each task, the user self-assessed their success, on a form 
with seven
questions, each with phrases indicating opposites and with 1-7 rating. A 
narrative
question asked how would the question have been answered without the internet.

7. Also common site-comparison form was used to provide their 1-7 rating on 
16 other
questions. This form was used to show cumulative ratings across that user's 
tasks.

8. The tester did summarize any (mimimal) mid-test dialog with a user.

The major implications (from Part 1: Research Results Table of Contents):

1. Graphic design neither helps nor hurts
2. Text links are vital
3. Navigation and Content are inseparable
4. Information retrieval is different from surfing
5. Web sites aren't like software

Regards/Harvey Bingham

Received on Monday, 24 July 2000 11:18:35 UTC