Oakland for Kids User Assessment

Audience

The Oakland for Kids web site is being developed in response to a California State requirement that grade schools teach local history in the third and fourth grade. Thus, the audience for this site is 8-years old to 10-years old children and third and fourth grade teachers. Our underlying assumptions about this group are as follows:

Students
· Early readers - the vocabulary should be accessible and text on the site should be unambiguous.

· Sesame Street attention span - information should be chunked into small amounts and the student should be able to click often.

· Varying interest in topic - this is the introduction of history as a subject and this is an opportunity to make it interesting. Topics covered should have a range of appeal while fulfilling course goals.

· Multi-cultural audience - most history texts are not inclusive with regard to race and gender. Text should include identification models for most of the students.

Teachers
· Underlying requirements - teachers should not have to supplement the material to meet the guidelines.

· Customizable - the site should allow teachers to choose the direction their class will take through the material and to focus on areas of interest to themselves and their students.

· Superior knowledge - the site should allow teachers to have information not available to the students.

First User Test

Barbara Stone asked four girls between the ages of 8 and 14 to look at the four sites listed below. They were then asked to write a paragraph on the site that included what they had learned or participated in, if anything, and how they rated the site in ease of getting around and appeal. The sites visited were:

http://www.kids-space.org/ http://www.ash.udel.edu/incoming/dkusefoglu/text/frame.html http://www.ncrel.org/mands/FERMI/prairie/4Prairie/4sum.html http://www.nwf.org/nwf/kids/cool/

In every case http://www.kids-space.org/ was the winner, primarily because it contained materials developed by other kids, allowed the users to contribute to the site, had lots of color and lots of opportunity to go somewhere else. Based on their comments, we concluded as follows:

· The site would need to have lots of navigation opportunities

· Brighter colors than typical educational sites

· An opportunity for the student to "do something"

· Animation or movement on most pages

Second User Test

After our team had completed the current version of the site, Barbara Stone tried a second user test. The initial test subjects were unavailable due to the fact that they had won the local soccer championship and were off to a regional tournament. In their place, two third graders and three adults tested the site. Their comments are summarized below.

Some suggestions and/or concerns

· Can't find where to start the game.

· History button takes you back to question 1 only, cannot progress in game

· WRONG seems a little harsh when the question is answered incorrectly, how about "NOT" or "Close but no bananas"

· The interface strikes me as too authoritarian and linear. Can't revisit a favorite spot and some questions require too many answers.

· I'd put snappy error messages in to keep the audience interested in answering the question again. Add value to making errors instead of slapping user in the face. For example, if number 4 answered incorrectly by choosing BART, say "Even 19th century people did not have enough patience or faith to entrust logs to BART."

· The viewer returns again and again to the board page; hence it needs to be quite interesting. Add a MIDI sound track in the background; maybe some animated gifs. Better yet, have the sound change as progress around the board occurs - indian music early in game, Spanish sounds and gunshots in the middle and swing music from WWII, finally Indigo Girls or some kid-friendly modern music at end.

· On several question pages, I inadvertently "cleared entry" rather than hit "Am I right" because of the proximity of the buttons. Also, "Am I right " is off the screen on my monitor. Could they all be on the same row?

· Question 10 should be about baseball!

· I'd make a bigger deal at end of game. Game over Man! Or something.

· The player needs better options when the game is over. They should be able to return to a question that interests them, explore the credits because now they are interested in the games creators, or move directly into history pages.

· Music or sounds to different clicks of activities would be nice.

· "When we get something right on our other games, a little man jumps up and down and shouts "hurray" - can't yours?"

On a more positive note

· Good presentation; colorful and the writing has personality.

· Loved the ostriches!

· Love the images of ancient Indians, settlements, etc. Makes the experience rich and interesting.

· Like the game idea and board metaphor.

· Had fun!

Site Evaluation

We used two site evaluation checklists in developing our site. Paul Gorski developed one at the Curry School of Education. It's focus is on multi-cultural development of web sites. The other is from Club Girl and is their rating system for ranking a web site "girl-friendly".

We were sensitive to both the multi-cultural and gender issues of creating web sites during our work on Oakland on the Move. Unfortunately, however, history as a field has not concerned itself with these issues until recent times and the amount of information available on alternate viewpoints is limited.