Alyssa Woodruff and Gloria Sanchez
May 5, 2016

Project Testing:
Academic Decathlon Website

Administrative Details

Client: James Monroe High School's Academic Decathlon Team

Contact person: Ximena Miller

Testing Document

Link to the Google Form: Here

In our survey, we asked for the following information:

• Demographic Information: This included information such as the viewer's name, age, what device they used to view the website, what browser they used to view the website, and whether they were a member of the team, a parent, teacher, alumni, or other.
• Scenario 1: We then asked the viewer to pretend they were a prospective member looking for a sample test. We asked them if they were able to sucessfully complete the task, how simple it was to complete, a description of how they completed it, and any suggestions for how the task could be made easier.
• Scenario 2: We then asked the viewer to pretend they were a parent looking to donate money to the team. We asked them if they were able to sucessfully complete the task, how simple it was to complete, a description of how they completed it, and any suggestions for how the task could be made easier.
• General Questions: We then asked if the viewer thought the website was easy to navigate, whether or not the website would encourage them to join the team, and any suggestions they had that could improve the website.

Tester Audience

The audience of our website is potential students, parents, and donors. Because of this, we tried to find testers who were in our target audience. We received eight responses. Of the respondents, six were in the 15-20 age range and two were in the 20-30 age range.

We also asked the respondents whether they were a member of the team, a parent, teacher, alumni, or other. Three said they were alumni, three were current members of the team, and two responded with "other."

Testing Platforms

The majority of respondents used a mobile phone to view the website. Of the remaining respondents, one used a Mac computer and one used a Windows computer.

Safari was the most popular used browser, with five of the respondents using this browser. The remaining three used Chrome.

Feedback Summary

Scenario 1

All of the respondents were able to complete scenario 1. 87.5% said that they thought the task was very simple, and the remaining 12.5% described it as simple. Respondents did not have any feedback for how the task could be made easier, as they thought it was easy enough already.

Scenario 2

Like scenario 1, all of the respondents were able to complete scenario 2. 75% described the task as very simple and the remaining 25% described it as simple. Most of the respondents did not have feedback for how the task could be made easier, but one person suggested adding more options of things to donate on the donation form, such as food and drinks.

General Information

All of the respondents found the website easy to navigate. When asked whether the website would encourage them to join the team, the respondents all said yes, with two of the respondents mentioning the alumni page in particular. When asked for suggestions on how the website could be improved, one suggested a calender be created with the event for the team, so current members would have a place to check when events were and prospective members could have an idea of the time commitment required for the team. Another respondent suggested having the homepage be made more interactive.

Response to Feedback

Keeping the feedback in mind, we'd like to make a few changes to improve the website:

• First, in terms of making the homepage more interactive, we could add a calender to the homepage as suggested by one of our respondents. In this way, prospective students and parents get an idea of the time committment that Academic Decathlon requires.
• Second, we want to change the image carousel so that it automatically changes from image to image instead of requiring the user to click on the arrows to switch the images. We think this would be especially useful for parents who might not be as tech savvy as their children.
• Third, while the feedback indicates that our respondents found the website easy to understand and informational, we'd like to add to the content in the following ways.
  1.) Add captions to the image gallery so that users know where the images were taken and who is featured in the images.
  2.) Add specific information to the "About Us" page detailing the time requirement of this extracurricular.
  3.) Add explicit information about the steps that students who are interested in the team can take to join it.
  4.) Taking into consideration that one of our target audiences are the parents and the alot of the parents are immigrants of Latin American descent, we'd like to add a Javascript application that translates the website's content from English to Spanish.
  5.) Considering how valuable our respondents found the Alumni page, we'd like to expand it so that more alumni are featured and we'd also like to include their contact information in case prospective students want to reach out.

Self-Reflection

The end result of our work makes us very proud of what we have both learned to implement in this class. This project was incredibly useful because it pushed us to think about how to design a product with accessiblity in mind.

In creating our Javascript applications, we both felt challenged. We were surprised by how much harder the Javascript applications proved to be. We both dealt with the challenges we faced in our own ways and in the process we learned more about ourselves and the way in which we approach problem solving.

Creating our website was excellent practice in teamwork. We both contributed equally to the creation of our website and coordinated our efforts well. We both reached out to one another when questions arose and deadlines approached. We worked well as a team and feel that this project helped hone our communication skills.