MaNIS Interface Project

Formal Usability Testing - Rebecca's Notes

As I was the facilitator on our testing team, these notes are miscellaneous observations from the various participant interviews.

One participant expected that by clicking on the "sort" link again, the sort order would be reversed.

One participant saw the green check mark after the Institution links as a checkbox. The participant was also looking for an X-box after the selected institution link in order to undo the selection of that institution.

A quick review by a curator helped us refine the terms for the "Sex" conditions on the Advanced panel. The terms should be: Female, Male, Not Recorded, and Recorded as Unknown.

Two participants mistook our example text on the Location page to indicate that locations would be entered in the format: "Pasadena, California" . However, this would not work, because the text string would have to match from two different database fields.

One participant sought more feedback about which fields were being searched by any particular typed-in text condition. The participant was also interested in being able to control which fields were being matched, if the search was covering multiple fields.

At least one participant was momentarily confused by the absence of the Catalog number on the Show/Hide column panel.

One participant mentioned an interest in searching for specimens from other countries. The current prototype has a subset of columns and data that assumes locations within the USA, but a final version should include the rest of the location columns.

Since museums from other countries will be contributing and using MaNIS, language localization should be considered for the final interface.

Two participants, who were much more experienced with MaNIS, were actually more hampered in figuring out the prototype interface - they didn't trust the interface to take care of them so they worried about spelling things right, added wildcard chars on text, and worried about how to combine search terms. The interface did answer their questions as they used it.

One participant mentioned looking for a Help button or link.