About

What is UX OWL?

In 2006, staff at the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) collaborated with Purdue’s Professional Writing Program to engage in a usability study that gathered information from OWL users about the latest update to the site.  The Purdue OWL, which started as a gopher site in 1993 and went online as a website in 1994, is a repository of writing materials akin to an online handbook.  More than 248 million users from 125 countries use the site each year, and users include students, teachers, parents, independent learners, government workers, and non-native speakers of English.  OWL materials range from static web pages covering the writing process to PowerPoint presentations and YouTube videos.

The 2006 usability study generated helpful data and a report that led to changes in design and taxonomy in subsequent years.  However, user-centered and participatory design is a recursive process, and we’re at the point of revisiting earlier research questions and asking new ones:  Are users finding what they need?  How has site growth impacted usability of the OWL? What new things can we learn about our users in order to keep the site accessible to a wide audience?  Can we incorporate recent technological developments and maintain accessibility? 

We will again partner with Purdue’s Professional Writing program to begin a new usability study.  The Purdue Writing Lab/OWL will serve as a client to students in ENGL 515, a capstone course focusing on User Experience located in the undergraduate Professional Writing major.  During the fall 2014 semester, students in the course will experiment with different testing instruments, develop testing protocols, draft documents for the human subjects testing review board, and offer budgets and suggestions for different types and parameters of testing.

This blog will document our research and collaboration process.  We expect to include a variety of documents that will interest writing center/OWL administrators, students studying user experience design and the faculty who teach them, web designers, and workplace practitioners:  meeting minutes, examples of ENGL 515 projects, research instruments, responses, data, prototypes, and more.