Now that we’ve got a couple of rough…

Now that we’ve got a couple of rough patches (welcome screen, color picker, “view” my site) it’s time go back and test a few users in our first discovery cycle with these patches applied, and see if we’ve made any progress.

Here’s the video, and here are my notes:

Step two notes – Log in

No problems.

Step two notes – Explain what you see

No problems.

Step Three notes – Preview your blog

  • 4:00 – She’s looking for a link
  • 4:14 – “Oh here it is” – She clicks “Visit my blog” in toolbar (Win for “view” my site patch).

Step Four notes – Change your background color

  • 5:45 – When asked to change the background color, she immediately (instinctively) clicked the big blue “customize my site” button (woot!).
  • 5:55 – she easily found the BG color option in the customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings..
  • 6:00 – Oh noooes, she found a bug in Iris (so painful to watch…)! clicking the right column of Iris does’t change the color in the text-field (After a bit of testing, it looks like if you click the right column first, before clicking the left gradient box, nothing happens. If you click, if you click the left box first, then the right column, it works as expected.) cc// @mattwiebe
  • 8:07 – “Each time I view my blog it gives me a slightly different picture”.
  • 9:10 – still trying to figure out why BG color isn’t changing – “I’m so confused”
  • 10:30 – Moved on without being able to figure out how to change BG color. 🙁

Step Five notes – Change your site title

  • 10:50 – Looking in Appearance -> HeaderHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. for a place to change her site title (which really makes sense, we need to add a link there).
  • 11:10 – didn’t find it in Appearance -> Header, no she’s checking all up and down the left nav
  • 12:20 – Found it in the customizer
  • 12:30 – What the? She couldn’t add spaces? That is weird. There is a bug in one of the patches? cc// koopersmith can you spot any reason why this would be happening in one of the patches listed above?
  • 13:20 – “I’m very confused – I don’t know how I would insert spaces”
  • 14:22 – gave up without being able to add spaces…

Step Six notes – Add your first post

No problems.

Step Seven notes – Preview your new post

No problems.

Step Eight notes – Publish an image

She found how to upload the image – not going to worry about anything after that for now, since media manager is being revamped. We’ll do plenty of user testing on the new media manager once it’s complete.

Recap

  • Bug in Iris prevented her from changing her background color
  • Can we please NOT have rotating header images in twenty twelve? None of the users we’ve tested have really comprehended what’s going on there.
  • We really should add a link on “Appearance -> Header” to “Settings -> General” to change their site title or tagline.
  • There was a bug in the customizer when she tried to update her site title which wouldn’t allow her to add spaces.

I’d like to get the color picker bug fixed before I run another user through these changes, but overall, I’d say these patches have already really improved things for first-time users. Thoughts?

#discovery-cycle-1, #user-testing