To get a good result and honest opinions I asked a selection of people unknown to me and who are the average web user. I asked both men and women from different age groups to navigate the site and try and send out a message and add a friend, amongst other activities. The groups of people are a friends rugby group, my cousins diet class and my grandmothers bingo club. the age ranged from 16 to 78 and included both males and females.
I didn't set any questions but just asked what they liked and disliked and watched how they managed ti use the website.
Feed back :
Matt Willock - age, 22
"really liked the site found most of the website very self explanatory but at first i didn't know that i had to click the earch to search for messages, this could do with some help i think!"
Sarah May - age, 16
"I do like it but wish they was a little more to do to meet people like Facebook has poke person to get there attention. something like that would be cool!"
Lillian Asquith - age, 65
"There seems to be a lot on screen, and when its all moving on screen, I just didn't know what to press, not so good at this Internet stuff"
Kenneth Jackson - age, 68
"I didn't know that the world had buttons on it to search and i found 'These images hard to understand', (ICONS)"
Sam Carter - age, 20
"i didn't know that i had to click the earth to search for messages"
My changes
After my user testing it clear that a lot of people didn't know the earth was click able this is the amendments i made to change this
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| After |
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| Before |
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| no glow on continents |
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| after with glow |
I also found that when the messages panel was on screen a few people did not know where to click. To prevent this i made everything else dim besides the panel the was on.
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| dimmed to allow user to focus |
After my amendments the users that had problems now found it easier to understand and think my changes improved my previous problem.