With the Advanced Professional Writing course that Dr. Salvo is teaching this year, the time is right for a new round of usability studies. Since starting in 2012, I have wondered what role I might be able to play in this project. While I am no tech novice, I'm far from the power user that I used to be in high school, when I was studying how to program routers and switches--how to make the internet work. And while usability and user experience design aren't often talked about in my field (applied linguistics), I'm hopeful that I can learn enough to be useful through following the 515 course readings and sitting in on the classes when I'm able. That being said, I do feel that my time both developing content for the Purdue OWL, and sitting in the OWL's nest helping to keep her soaring will be helpful in the completion of this project. I believe that I can help to offer additional perspective. It may also be that my previous OWL research, focusing on L2 writing teacher's use of the OWL and on content development best-practices may be helpful in the endeavor on which we are about to embark.
Creating a Plan
At the beginning of summer, Purdue OWL leadership and Dr. Salvo met to begin early discussions on how the next round of usability studies might unfold and on what our goals for this round might be. That was in early to mid-May. After that, Dr. Salvo and our associate director left the States for a summer study abroad and research trip to Scotland. Shortly after their return, we held our second strategizing meeting. It was a fruitful meeting, one of those meetings where you could see the progress bar fill a little more. The kind of meetings that make you feel good about meetings. During this meeting, Dr. Salvo and I discussed the direction his class will take in the fall, which included a list of readings and planning the sequencing for two of the course assignments. The reading list is unlike most reading lists that I see in English department classes, even disciplinarily focused ones. The readings for this course are predominantly on usability and design principles, useful readings for students at Purdue. I must admit that I’m a bit excited about these readings, too. Any time that we can create a space for students, especially graduate students, to engage with new readings--readings potentially outside their interest or their disciplines--we are providing students and young professionals with the opportunity to learn to read in new ways and to find possible interfaces between disparate bodies of knowledge.We covered a lot of ground in this meeting. We began sketching out a multi-tiered usability test with both large- and small-scale tests and sub-tests. Currently, our ideal-targets include a large-scale demographics survey (10k target) and three smaller online usability tests (~100 ea.). this will be followed up by a number of in-lab usability tests (~50). There will be some similarity between select online and in-lab tests. For example, we plan on having both web-based and in-lab card sort activities. These activities will be similar to what the OWL and Dr. Salvo did a few years ago, allowing participants to reorganize components of the OWL, e.g., the landing page. It is possible that the web-based and in-lab card sorts will yield interesting results when compared to one another. Some of these tests will also include working with our new eye-tracker package. We’re fortunate to have a very energetic student working with us on this part of the testing. We’ll also be looking into shoestring testing--testing on budget--and distance testing. The findings here may be of particular use to scholars in the social sciences and the humanities.
