Roots
A family tree application
Task
For this project I worked as part of the usability team to test designs passed on from the Graphical User Interface (GUI) team. Volunteers were shown designs in multiple stages of the project, including static pages and live web pages. They were assessed through task analysis and surveys to determine the ease of use of all features on the website. We also conducted research on other family tree style websites to determine successful and unsuccessful features of existing designs.
The Take-Away
This project taught me what it would be like to work with multiple departments in a real-world scenario. It also displayed the importance of user testing and how it can affect the usability of a product. The backend developers were skeptical of the necessity of user testing but by including their team leaders as subjects in the testing we were able to prove to them how important this process is.
This is the home page and login for Roots. We used this page to test different color schemes. By conducting user testing on other sites we determined the optimal design for this page.
This is an example of a page without implementation of our user testing results. This is a individual family member page. It allows for the creation, editing and deleting of family members as part of a family tree. Our user testing found that the size of the buttons is to large, the text should be spread out to make better use of the negative space, and time stamp for birth needs its own cell.
This is a profile creation form. This form went through multiple iterations before this final version. Earlier versions required users to input information that we found, through user testing, to be unnecessary or intrusive.
This chart shows the feedback gathered from one of our survey questions.