Introduction and Webpage:
The goal for this experiment is to see how efficiently a user can navigate the specified website (https://www.reddit.com) and if they can complete the given task. There will be two tasks given to the user and as the analyst, I will be observing their experiences, failures, and any successful task completed. We will also take into account the different ways the user completes specific task and how I would’ve done the same activity. The user is a retired teacher so their expertise would have to do with analysis and comprehension. I’d put their familiarity level with this site in the beginner range as they don’t have any experience with it.
Observation:
To complete this experiment the user and I started a meeting using the Microsoft Teams application. I had the user share their screen and walk through their settings to make sure everything was ok to run. Based on my observations, the user seemed to be initially confused. The user first scrolled through the website home page and tried clicking on the pictures posted. After reading on through the blog post the end user tried clicking on the available arrows. (Upvotes, downvotes, comments, etc.)
Doing this actually brought out some interesting results as it prompted the user to either sign in or create an account. Once that failed, the user then tried to use the other buttons to get more options. From there the user clicked on the comments to see additional post and scrolled around a bit for information. Here is where I noticed the user seemed to be more confused during the assignment while also scrolling through website as most of the options, they were trying to select required them to make an account to proceed.
Once done, the user navigated back to the home page by selecting the back button multiple times. This is where I instructed the user to try and find post about the different football games that happened over the weekend. The first thing the user did was click on the side panel and select the sports section.
Once on the sports section the end user scrolled through the page until they found the LSU game results and looked for the comments underneath the post for details.
Analysis:
Looking at the what the end user did in what vs what I would’ve done brought some very interesting thoughts and new methods to mind as far as navigating goes. When giving the user the task of finding information on sports and college football, my user decided to use the community bar on the right side of the screen to find sports and ultimately college football. To me this required a little more steps to complete the objective as I would’ve probably used the search bar to look up a specific game or teams to get my information. While both eventually got to the same end result, I did notice that once a sport was selected, the page showed all relevant teams and events which in theory probably gave more accurate information and articles about the events that occurred. In this regard the site helps novice users by analyzing different clicks and suggesting topics that fall in that category. Another small observation I had was how the end users navigated the page. Rather than using the Reddit button/home button or sliding back on their trackpad, my end user decided to go the old fashion route and keep selecting the back button or mistakenly opening new tabs. This tells me that the user isn’t as efficient with navigating webpages which explains why some tasks might take longer than others on different sites.