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Typical Users Test

Overview

The Target Market for the Sonoma County Folk Society are musicians, and people who enjoy music. The members enjoy listening to music, playing music and learning information about music.

The testers I used for this site are all people connected to the site. I contacted members of the featured bands and venues as well as the board members and others suggested by the President. One tester is a professional webdesigner for musicians.

Eight people responded and provided feedback to my request for typical user testing.

We sent users a list of questions to answer in an email, asked for a reply within one week.

Sonoma County Folk Society Testing Survey

Required Questions

Initials Group Computer Monitor size Monitor colors Operating system Browser (include version) Internet connection
MB Blairworks Dell 9300 laptop 1680x1050 (secodnary screen) 32 bit colors Windows XP Professional Google Chrome 1.0.154 DSL
LW Petaluma Church Concerts MacBook Pro (Intel chip) 17 in - 1440x900 lots of em! 32 bit 10.4.11 Firefox 3.0.10 DSL
BN SoCoFoSo iMac G5     OS X Safari 3.2.1 DSL
GM wed night group Dell Inspiron 1520 15 I think standard Windows Vista Explorer Google  
JD SoCoFoSo HP Pavillion Intel D CPU 2.80 GHz 2 GB of Ram HP vs17 I dunno; it's a p.c., about 4 years old   nternet Explorer, this time; not sure of version, but a later one Comcast Cable

Recommended Questions

  1. Name an upcoming event for the Sonoma County Folk Society?
    • MB: Didn't remember any but I remember seeing some things at the Black Rose Pub.
    • GM: Celtic Festival, Bluegrass
  2. What type of group is the Sonoma County Folk Society?
    • MB: People who like and perform folk music in Sonoma County
    • LW: all volunteer. It DOES NOT say if the group is a 501c3 nonprofit (which could influence the decision to make contributions)
  3. Where on the site would you go if you wished to join a jam session?
    • MB: I wouldn't know from glancing at the navigation.
    • LW: Community
    • GM: Jam page
  4. Where on the site can you listen to music?
    • MB: Look & Listen
    • LW: Look & Listen. Got a strange page entitled "Navigation Keyboard Controls" on the gallery page http://student.santarosa.edu/~anarbuto/socofoso/socofoso/html/gallery1.html
    • GM: links and several other places
  5. Where on the site did you find information about your company or group?
    • MB: Didn't see anything about my company there.
    • LW: venues
  6. Is any information missing or incorrect?
    • MB: n/a
    • LW: see comment above

Recommended Questions

  1. What is the overall tone and feel of the site?
    • MB: Too drab and hard to read -- lots of tiny fonts combined with low contrast text made me have to focus a bit too hard. The background feels muddy and makes the whole thing feel a bit more boring than it should. The masthead provided the most impact for me and I liked the mix of black and white and color photos there. page where you can listen to music felt like the strongest page of the site to me and was really engaging.
    • LW: mellow
    • BN: You have done a terrific job making the site very attractive and very easy to manipulate.
    • GM: Feels pretty good. I wonder if the background colors wash out the type. It's a little hard to read, and font size is quite small.
    • CC: The change is great! I love the look.
  2. What is the site about?
    • MB: Folk music and musicians in Sonoma County
    • LW: SOCOFOSO
    • GM: Music in this area
    • CC: The Sonoma County Folk Society
  3. What was your first impression of the opening screen?
    • MB: Mostly covered above. Too bland and muddy -- fairly poor impact personally (sorry!).
    • LW: much better than before. Though mix of color and B&W images a bit odd. Likes the colors overall but could see how readability might be an issue, both in contrast and type size (I can read it fine, but "folk" does draw an older audience than average)
    • BN: I loved the pictures across the top.
    • GM: I liked the photos at the top
    • CC: ...it looks very contemporary, good colors (easy on the eyes), nice set up...
  4. Where did you first click?
    • MB: About
    • LW: Venues
    • GM: Probably calendar
    • JD: I clicked just about everything on the site. I could listen to music just fine.
    • CC: Can't remember.
  5. Did you find the site easy to navigate?
    • MB: Reasonably easy -- some of the navigation items seemed vague. I thought Community might have a forum in it and was disappointed when it didn't.
    • LW: average, clear, but some things aren't quite where one might expect. perhaps About us and Contact Us could be combined?
    • JD: It is very clear.
    • BN: Very
    • GM: yes. worked well
    • CC: The navigation is easy...
  6. Were the pages interesting? Why or why not?
    • MB: Except for the music page, no. and I suspect this is for a couple reasons:
      • The background color makes it hard to read. The eye naturally gravitates to the SoCoFoSo logo. The eye gravitates towards that because of the contrast.
      • There needed to be shorter bits of text and subheadings to break it up. Photos were too small. More would have been nice, even if they were stock images. Fonts were too small throughout. Also, Serfied fonts are tough to read at small sizes.
      • The Don't Miss section on the home page was too tiny and the header receded into the background.
    • LW: Average. Seems like there could be wider collection of images. Something to work on, gathering images from events
    • BN: Yes
    • GM: The pages about the Folk Society could be better
    • JD: I would go to this site for information, which is set up well, except for the Calendar, which I will expand on, on another page
    • CC: Most were but some didn't have any info on them, just "Navigation Keyboard Controls"
  7. What did you like best about the site?
    • MB: Masthead photo and the music page.
    • LW: that it's relatively current and looks much better
    • GM: I liked how it links to other web sites fast
    • JD: I like the color & photos.
    • CC: The look of the whole thing.
  8. What suggestions for improvement do you have?
    • MB:
      • Change the fonts: Use a serif font like Georgia maybe for the H1,H2,H3 headings to give it that folky feel. Do the navigation and copy in Arial or Verdana.
      • Change the font color: go for a darker color in most cases -- save the green for headings.
      • Change the background color: Consider the virtues of #FFFFFF (white) instead of #E7DAB0 (tan). Look close at the SoCoFoSo log because that gets a nice feel designwise.
      • Increase the size of photos. Look at Wikimedia for Public Domain images of instruments and such that maybe can be used as spot art here and there. Consider making pull quotes for some key points in the content that get treated using larger fonts (similar to what you see in magazines). More H2,H3 headings sprinkled throughout.
      • Consider rethinking that Community section so that that material doesn't get burried in the site in a place that isn't intuitive. A couple of those items might perform better as top level navigation.
      • Archives could probably be eliminated by making these linked only from Folknotes and the Photo Gallery. Home can probably be removed these days if you make the masthead/site id clickable -- that should free up some room.
    • LW: see elsewhere
    • BN: You might ask Steve Delap for copies of the videos SCFS made at the SRMedia Center and were broadcast on cable 72.
    • GM: Font size and/or color on first pages are pretty bland
    • JD: I'm not sure about the font (Times New Roman?) not exciting at all. In the future, will the FolkNotes be entered in a better format than the obviously scanned paper copies?
    • CC: Not scanning the folknotes flyer and then posting that. Make separate pages.
  9. Were there any links that did not work, images that did not load, typos?
    • MB: Not that I saw
    • BN: Could not get to see the slide shows for the pictures. From the "Look & Listen" on home page, trying to get to photo gallery doesn't work. I just get "Navigation; Keyboard controls; the following apply in any supporting browser besides Opera, which uses the default Opera Show controls instead" , followed by an Action/Key(s) chart. First this page is white and technical-looking, then becomes a green page. ?! I see now that this first page was giving instructions for viewing the slides. This through FolkNotes Archives "photo gallery archives". However, when I click on this weird green computer speak chart, I get to the photos.
    • GM: Couldn't get video going
    • CC: There are a few pages that go to a "Navigation Keyboard Controls" page (like the photo gallery pages) that I am assuming will be updated when possible.
  10. Could you find the online information to join the organization? Describe how you found this item.
    • MB: Nope, didn't see it. If this is important maybe it should have been in the navigation as "Join" or in a teaser below the navigation.
    • LW: The invitation to join is on front page, but other than that it's not that obvious - no clear link to join, even from the info on front page. Could use a specific link in left side navigation and at bottom of each page.
    • GM: Didn't try, but looks like it must have worked, found this item.
    • JD: It looks easy enough to join.
    • CC: Clicked on Contact us.
  11. Did you find the calendar, was it easy to read?
    • MB: Yea, tough to read, Needs larger months, maybe some kind of shading behind each item and larger date numbers as these seemed to be getting lost and it was difficult to tie them to a particular event. They should probably be justified with the top of the event info. Title of each event should be bolder and more clear.
    • LW: Found it, but not easy to read. Needs more dynamics in font size/bolds. Perhaps names of bands/performers in bold, spaces between listings. The lining up on date and information is a bit hard to get used to at first - I'd rather the date line up with first line of listing. And then the big question....who is entering all that info in - is it a self posting calendar or does somebody at SOCOFOSO manually compose and enter all info.
    • GM: yes it was pretty good
    • JD: I would go to this site for information, which is set up well, except for the Calendar. Maybe it's just me, but the calendar layout is confusing to me-like it's confusing whether an event is on April 10 or 11. Do the listings begin opposite the date, or is the date in the middle of the section describing the events for that time. Would increased spacing between dates help? Just a comment. On "Calendar," why is the Kevin Russell listings, the Laurie Schaeffer's Calendar and SOCOLIVE all in non-conforming formats? Could Kevin's name PLUS Laurie Schaeffer's name be in Capital Letters PLUS underlined so that it looked similar to the SOCOLIVE listing? It might make it more clear that we are offering 3 choices of alternate calendars.
    • CC: Yes and yes.

Extra Comments

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