prounounced : madʒʌɪl

late Middle English: via French from Latin agilis, from agere ‘do’, and from Old French magique, from Latin magicus (adjective), late Latin magica (noun), from Greek magikē (tekhnē) ‘(art of) a magus’: magi were regarded as magicians.

Pottermore had an established set of personas for their users, the challenge was to bring them to life for the management team.  The easiest way was to combine personas with actual customer data, so we could work out where the pain points where for various tasks the users wanted to complete. At the time I was reading, ‘Badass: Making Users Awesome’ by Kathy Sierra, so was trying to see how you could make it easier for casual users to become more engaged and become ‘evangalists’ or ‘story masters’.

I wanted to improve the Pottermore website, in terms of its usability. With a very crowded publishing schedule, there was always something new to publish or promote, so there wasn’t a regular testing process. I asked some neighbours and friends if they would participate in some informal testing.

I based my test around Steve Krug’s book, ‘Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability’, which is pretty much all you need to know about user testing. He advocates that even informal do it yourself testing is better than no testing at all.

When I was lucky enough to be working at Pottermore, there was a whole bunch of ‘fact checkers’ who knew the Harry Potter universe inside out, and when EW originally pitched to Pottermore Gus proposed and prototyped a ‘narrative engine’ for exploring the story.

As a personal side project I thought it would be great to try and understand the time over which the Pottermore universe unfolds and see if there were any interface metaphors or concepts that could be used to make the content of the site more discoverable.