Goal: Find a pie chart showing the results from the Canadian National Election of 2011.
- "Ections Canada" searched in Google.
- "Elections Current & Past Elections" selected from a list of subpages appended to the Elections Canada website, which was the first result of the search.
- Page skimmed, "2011 General Election" selected.
- Resultant "outline" page scanned for a link containing "final" or "results."
- "The information may be more quickly found by starting over."
- "Canadian election 2011 results" searched in Google.
- "Canada Votes 2011 - CBC News" selected.
- Page scanned and a bar chart is found, partially achieving the goal. "Breaking down the election results" selected.
- Second bar graph contradicts the first.
- Back button to "Canadian election 2011 results" Google search results page.
- "2011 Canadian Election Results" is selected.
- The two graphs, one showing votes and the other showing riding wins, explains the discrepency in the two different graphs on the CBC website, and achieves the test goal.
What we can learn from this user test about best practices:
- Users judge a site's potential capacity to help them achieve their goal based mostly on its source. In this case, priority was given first to an official government source, then to an official news source, and finally to a university source.
- User behaviour is learned and adaptive. The same user would likely reverse the sequence of sources the next time they had to accomplish a similar task.
- The government makes bad websites for themselves, and so do crown corporations.
- A confused pause preceded selection of the "Elections Current & Past Elections" link on the Elections Canada website. When something in a short list is accented too dramatically, it can actually set it apart so much from the rest of the options that it's perceived as unrelated to the content surrounding it. In other words, in a short list, an item that is at the top and highlighted is likely to be read last.
- In a long list of items, however, certain key aspects should have been highlighted. The Elections Canada 2011 elections directory page did actually have a 2011 election results link, right at the top, but the list was so long that it went unnoticed.
- On a site with tons and tons of content, it's easy to let your main, key, most important information get buried. Even behind the aforementioned link on the Elections Canada directory page, there's no easy-to-find election results pie chart, which is what should have been on their front page.
