Wellesley College News
Rebecca Spitzer and Lauren Rivard

Testing!

We sent the link to our webpage out to quite a few people: Wellesley students, Wellesley News staffers (including our clients), and parents outside of the Wellesley bubble. Each tester reviewed the website and then filled out a questionnaire about their impressions. In all, we have feedback from nine Wellesley College students (4 News staff members and 5 readers of the paper) and three parents. 9 PCs and 3 Macs were used. 3 testers used Internet Explorer, 6 used Mozilla Firefox, and 3 used Safari.

Our questionaire included the following:

Do you think that the website fulfills our goals of bringing the paper to a larger audience?

Did you find the site easily navigable? Was the content you were interested in
easy to find and to understand?

Are there any features you liked about the site?

What did you dislike about the site? What do you think should be changed?

If you are familiar with the existing site, do you thing that this is an improvement? Why or why not?

Do you find the site aesthetically pleasing? Why or why not?

Do you have any other comments for us?

Results:

Overall, our testers gave us similar feedback. All of the testers liked the design and layout; most liked the color scheme. A few commented on their appreciation of the presence of color images on the main page. One added, " I loved that the pictures change on the front page when its reloaded. That is SOOO cool!" One of our clients, Anabel Lee, wrote, "I like that I don't have to scroll horizontally and that the content fit nicely. I also like the fonts because they reflect what we use in the hardcopy (the old site used Verdana, which looks really unprofessional). I also like the colored photos!"

However, some testers had problems with navigating through the page. They often got confused by the appearance of a new window after the opening animation, and would attempt to go back to the opening page every time they wanted to navigate somewhere new, instead of using the navigation bar on the left. Instead of disregarding these results, we're going to attempt to make the navigation more obvious by not having the main page open in a new window. Without the existence of a second window, viewers should be able to see how to navigate through the main window.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the animation, especially the lighter blue "bubbles". But some testers, especially the parents, complained that it took too long to load and suggested that the letters come in faster. One wrote, "I think the animation at the beginning is a little bit slow.  If the letters in "Wellesley News" came out a little bit faster it might improve the site." We took that into account by re-exporting the animation with the letters' frames coming in at a faster rate.

As well, almost all testers agreed that the "more" button was too small and difficult to see. Testers wrote, "The only thing I would recommend it to make it more obvious that "...more" is a clickable link," and "This is purely preference: the 'more' part is a little small, and the font is black so someone who is quickly reading through may not realize the link is there." We agreed with our testers on this issue, and went back into our CSS document to make the text of the more links bolder and larger.

In Conclusion:

Because of the feedback recieved from testers, we decided to change the target of the main page's open command, the speed of the beginning of the animation, and the styling of the "more" links.

In general, our feedback was very gratifying, especially the feedback from Wellesley News Staffers. Most of them were overwhelmingly thankful and excited about the project, especially the new functions of the archives. They responded: "Thanks so much for doing this! I've had so many people ask me why the website isn't updated or why they can't find anything on the old website, and this new website looks like it's going to be amazing!"