Hotmail

Your situation

Your group is a team of usability experts who are employed by the Ace Consulting Company (™)  in order to evaluate the usability of the free web-based mail service, Hotmail, © Microsoft.  You have been assigned by the VP of your company in order to determine if hotmail meets the needs of the people who currently use the system.  In addition, your VP may be interested in seeing how quickly new users learn the use of this service. Your job is to study the program and find any problems that may arise when people are using the system that are caused by flaws in the design of the interface.  This will be done by observing people who are using the program while they are carrying out 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:

• Non-users, people who have an email account but do not have a hotmail account.

• Novice users, who just use the basic features of the hotmail e.g., they only read and compose mail.

• Intermediate users who use many of the features available through hotmail (e.g., junk mail filtering) but don't know it all.

• Power users, someone who is familiar with and uses on a regular basis all (or close to all) 7of the features of hotmail.

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 but you 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 is something that many end-users are likely to complete with hotmail; tasks should also be selected to investigate different (but still important or heavily used) parts of the system's features.

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 write up some additional tasks of your own:

Sample tasks:

Note: Due to privacy concerns you may have to have your test participants create a new hotmail account just for the purposes of the test.  If this is the case, then you have to get things set up for them with the tasks that require the participant to have mail already in their hotmail account e.g., to have the person complete a read email task send the person some email before the test.  To set up the tasks so that person can complete task #1 and tasks that require email to be in their hotmail account you should first have the person create a new hotmail account.  Then another group member can send email to this new account as you run the usability test or you can have the person use another hotmail account that your group has already been pre-created and already has emails sent to it.

Task 1.  Getting a hotmail account.  You heard from a friend that Microsoft provides free email accounts.  Unfortunately your friend didn't provide you with any additional details.   Find the web site that allows you to get this free email account and create yourself an account. 

Reason for choosing this task:  The successful completion of this task is a prerequisite for all other tasks.  No matter how easy that it may be to use the email service or how powerful the system is, all this is irrelevant if the person cannot determine where the hotmail web site is and what he or she needs to do in order to get a hotmail account.

Task 2: Reading your email.  Access and read your hotmail email for today.

Reason for choosing this task.  Obviously this is the most important and frequently completed task for an email service.

Task 3.  Cleaning out your mailbox.   You find that it is necessary to clean out your mailbox.  Go through your inbox and get rid of all the extraneous emails.   Depending upon the individual test participant you may be able to provide more personalized compelling motivations e.g., the person gets a lot of spam each day and has to do a mass deletion of his or her junk mail; because the person never deletes any email he or she has used up all their disk quota on hotmail so this person has to browse through a bunch of letters in order to determine what should be deleted.  Be careful that you do not make the person delete any important personal emails just to complete this task!

Reason for choosing this task: Although this is carried out on an infrequent basis, because of the limits on storage space eventually every hotmail user will have to get around to deleting unwanted emails.

Preparing Equipment

Test participants can either access a hotmail account from their own computer (ideal) or they can try to access it from your own account (if you find it more convenient to use the computers in the lab). 

Parts of the system to exclude from your the usability study

• Any parts of the system that do not have anything to do with the free email service provided with hotmail e.g., the online calendar or Windows Messenger.

• Email services are not displayed through a web browser e.g., mobile alerts