We used our first prototype to test some very basic ideas that we had regarding how users could accomplish the revised high-level tasks. We had a number of ideas of how the site should be organized, but the one we wanted to try first involved the distinct separation of the three major tasks: a section of the site to search conversations and see conversation metadata, a section to use topics to get to blog conversations and see topical metadata, and a section to finding specific blog metadata and statistics. There would be various linking between the three sections.

Interaction flow:

We spent the the most time discussing how one could get a sense of a relevant search result, see who responded to a blog, and to see the greater context of a blog conversation. At this point we even began to question the idea of a "conversation" as an appropriate metaphor.

Another difficult we had was coming up with task scenarios for the test. First, as much of the site is content driven, we knew that various aspects of the test would be artificial. For example, we would have to supply the participants with search terms. Second, we didn't have ready access to participants that matched our primary personas (Abigail and David). Furthermore, as David is dealing with political issues, we didn't want to necessarily make participants feel that we were asking them for political opinions. Nor did we want our political views to infiltrate the test. In the end, we felt we should just pick something that was a light-hearted current event (a controversial one, but not one that we necessarily were worried about).

As we were testing primarily site structure, we felt comfortable varying the types of participants. This would help us see if the interface broke down across users, even those with different levels of exposure to blogs and different levels of technical savvyness.

Finally, we tried to put real-sounding content into the search results. As this was not a test of layout, it was important to put something in front of the participants that contained a lot of information to mentally wade through.

See pictures of our prototype.