Your group is a team of usability experts who are employed by the Ace Consulting Company (™) in order to evaluate the usability of the WestJet web site. You have been assigned by the VP of your company in order to determine if the WestJet web pages meets the needs of the people who currently use the site. In addition, your VP may be interested in seeing how new users will interact with the site as well. Your job is to study the site and find any problems that may arise when people are using the site caused by flaws in the design of the interface. This will be done by observing people who are using the site doing a set of pre-created tasks and then recommending ways in which these flaws may be corrected. Try to get as wide a mix of test participants within this range as possible (e.g., people who travel on WestJet but who have never used the web site before, regular and experienced users of the site, someone who has never flown on WestJet before but may do so in the future etc).
It is up to your team of consultants to come with a set of typical tasks that should be completed by the test users. (Although I have started all the groups off by providing a list of sample tasks each group should add to this list). The assignment sheet has a section that indicates how you can go about this and should already be familiar with task descriptions from Assignment 1. As well, the experimenter should try the system ahead of time, becoming as familiar with it as possible. Your group should come up with at least three other reasonable tasks to give to participants; preferably, you should come up with even more. A good task one that is likely to be used by many end-users. Tasks should also be selected to investigate different (but still important or heavily used) parts of the system functionality.
Here is a list of some sample tasks to start you all out. Feel free to use them in your study but again make sure that you create some additional tasks of your own:
Task 1. Finding the site. You heard from a friend that WestJet's web site provides a number of interesting online services such as flight reservations. However, your friend cannot remember the web address. Use whatever mechanism that you want in order to find the main homepage for WestJet and display it in your web browser.
Reason for choosing this task: No matter how good the website may be designed it is only of value if people can actually find it. The main point of this task is to determine the different ways that people will employ to find the site (e.g., use a search engine to find it, directly typing in the address) and how successful they are at it (if they can easily find it with search tool, if they are able to correctly type the address on the first try etc.).
Task 2. Searching the flight listings. An old friend of yours is supposed to arrive on a flight from Toronto tomorrow night. Unfortunately you've lost the email that he sent me you with the particular details so this is the only information that you can recall. From the WestJet site try to determine when you are supposed to meet your friend in the airport.
Reason for choosing this task: Although this is an infrequent task people who are trying to find flight information sometimes do not have all of the required information so a fuzzy search must be conducted.
Task 3: Finding cheap flights. You want to find the cheapest flight possible in order to make it home to visit your family in Vancouver for the holidays. You want to leave sometime after December 22 (but definitely before December 24) and return back to Calgary after January 2nd and definitely before January 6th. Since you are trying to save as money as you can you would be willing to be flexible in your departure and arrival dates so long as they fall within the stipulated range of dates.
Reason for choosing this task. This is a simple yet core task as people frequent use online sites to price shop.
Either test participants can use a browser from their own account or you can set up a browser from your own account. If you are reusing a browser (e.g., in your login account) clear the browser's cache and history list before each session. This is you don't want the link highlights to give the user clues of where to go. Or if some pages require a very long load time then you wouldn't want the fact that pages were pre-cached for all the users except for the first one to bias your results. The site may be busy or there may be slow network connections. Slow system response times are a part of system usability and should not be ignored because these are the same issues that actual users of the system will have to face. Depending on how you run participants, you may want to have a browser (e.g., Netscape or Internet Explorer) up and ready at the home page for WestJet (http://www.westjet.com), although I recommend that you have people start cold for at least the first task (e.g., how to find the site.).