Engineering Te Ara
Usability Research
Carved self-portrait by Raharuhi Rukupō
Abel Tasman stamp issued in 1940
Task analysis is the process of identifying and understanding users' goals and tasks, the strategies they use to perform the tasks, the tools they currently use, any problems they experience, and the changes they would like to see in their tasks and tools.
COP Outcome development and evaluation
Students were probed about their use of the internet. How often and where did they use it? What sites did they visit? What were their motivations and expectations? The design team also wanted to know what kind of school projects the students did and the kind of online and offline processes they used to do their research.
During development, a representative cross-section of well over 100 student test subjects was used to solve design problems and to answer specific questions. Student input was used to shape initial ideas and evolve these ideas into workable solutions as the site developed.
A market researcher conducted sessions with primary school students, Years 9 to 10 and 13 students, university honours students and students from Māori Immersion Schools, such as Te Kura Kaupapa. To make sure her work was useful, the researcher created a number of personas. Personas are a design tool, used in many types of industrial design, consisting of a set of stories that capture the goals and motivations of characters representing discrete user groups. Personas are a quick and effective way of providing a project team with insight into user needs.
Armed with an understanding of their target "clients", the design team set to and began designing the information architecture of the website. How best to organise Te Ara's information to maximise its accessibility? In the 1966 edition, content was presented in alphabetical order, with some subjects grouped under broader headings, such as "Defense" or "Education". Te Ara means "the pathway". The new encyclopedia offers many different pathways to data, and there lies the challenge in accessibility. These knowledge streams branch and intersect like the neurons in a brain. To be of any real value, the site has to allow users to locate information easily, if not intuitively. To achieve this, the team created mental models of their sample users, using a technique called card sorting. Mental models describe the way users expected information to be categorised and organised and named on the website.
