User testing with person with Cognitive disability

I had the opportunity to do some usability testing with a user who had a
significant cognitive disability a couple of days ago and thought it might
be useful to share my experience with the group. This is only one user and
of course there are as many various of cognitive disability as there are
users who have them. But I still think it was a useful exercise.

The user was a 29 year old female with fetal alcohol syndrome. She has a
cognitive functioning of someone about 10-12 years old but has maintained
employment with the same company for 8 years doing cleaning, helping in the
kitchen which feeds 30 and other support for the organization. She very
responsible, has her own bank account which she maintains and uses email,
social media and texting easily.

I invited her to use several web sites, to test a job application online
and to also try the COGA personalization example
 https://rawgit.com/ayelet-seeman/coga.personalisation/demo/conactUs.html
created for the cognitive task force, and I also asked her about the types
of sites she likes and doesn't like. Here are my findings.

   - We started with a news site. I asked her t look for a job
   http://www.nationalpost.com/index.html
   - She had trouble finding the link to "jobs" and tried several others
   first, before she found it. When she found it she knew it was the right one.
   - She understood the jobs page and I asked her to sign up to apply.
   - There was a form to fill out to create an account with the job bank.
   It asked for email address and password.
   - Now here is where it gets interesting. She didn't realize that this
   account was separate from her gmail and that although she needed to use her
   own email to receive notifications, she DIDN'T need to provide her password
   for her gmail account. She could choose a separate one, but she didn't know
   that, and started to put her password into the form before I stopped her.
   The idea pf entering her personal email account with a different password
   than her email account because this is NOT her email account was confusing.
   - This speaks to me about the COGA success Criteria about protecting
   personal information.
   - Besides that she did well on the job application.

Next we went to the example of personalization mock up.
https://rawgit.com/ayelet-seeman/coga.personalisation/demo/conactUs.html

She understood the initial page load form reasonably well, but when she
went to fill in the subject she didn't know what to right. She said. "they
don't say anywhere what the subject is, how can i fill it out"

The subject field was for her to pick a subject such as shoes.  So that
stopped her. I said "can you see any buttons that would make it easier for
you." She didn't understand what I meant, but I hinted and said, "what
about on the right side?". She then found the "show more/less" buttons. She
liked the simpler form and it got her past her dilemma of not knowing what
to put in the "subject" field.

Next I asked her what she liked in a web site. She said, I like them when
they are

   - specific instructions and interfaces
   - clear messaging
   - step by step instructions
   - familiar sites that she has gotten used to

​She's very functional on the web, but she has people teach her what to do,
and then she goes to those limited number of familiar sites...

In general, my experiences with this test are consistent with many of the
suggestions of the COGA Task Force.
Cheers,
David MacDonald



*Can**Adapt* *Solutions Inc.*
Tel:  613.235.4902

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