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.

I broke the test down into a number of stages, I asked my participants about themselves, to establish a context for the following questions and tasks. Firstly we reviewed the Homepage, just to see how much the users understood what is going on. Secondly I asked about their favourite character, as some of my participants were very big Harry Potter fans. But as the site has lots of information in the ‘Explore the Story’ and ‘Features’ sections which make it a sort of Harry Potter encyclopedia. Having tried out the site, I asked them to do some general browsing, just so I could see how they found navigating the site. As Pottermore had just relaunched it registration process, which allowed you to go on and be sorted into your house, we tried that out. Finally I presented the participant with a ‘Product Reaction Card’, which had about a hundred adjectives on, based on Joey Bendeck and Trish Miner  “Measuring Desirability: New Methods for Evaluating Desirability in a Usability Lab Setting” work for Microsoft. (which I came across in this uxmatters article) The advantage of this process is that if all of your users settle on the same adjectives, you clearly have a focus. If you round up with a general discussion most participants may give similar feedback, but I find its open to interpretation. If everyone picks ‘Novel’ and ’Sophisticated’ then you know where you are at.

I can’t reveal the results, but I was able to present my findings at our weekly show and tell. We then had an evidence based approach for making some valuable usability improvements to the site.