Support/Goals/UX Testing/2010-12
Since I did the last round of user testing in October, we launched the new KB with a redesigned start page, search summaries (and keywords that work), and a bunch of search fixes (bugs 586034, 596623, 596624, 596973, 601655, 586034). The good news is that the our front page search is much improved. If you search the problematic search phrases from the last test you'll see that you get much better results now:
- Why did adobe flash crash (previously this returned zero results)
- What to do when flashplayer crash (previously this returned zero results)
- flashplayer crash (previously this returned only forum threads)
- flash player crash (previously this didn't find the article "The Adobe Flash plugin has crashed")
- can't find downloaded files (previously didn't return any relevant results)
For this test I repeated the test from October. This time the tester was able to easily find the correct article each time with the target articles listed in the first few results.
In addition to testing the front page search, I tested to see how people found SUMO by starting them on the Firefox start page and telling them to find an answer for their issue. One tester went directly to SUMO by choosing Firefox Help from the Help menu and the other searched Google. The Google search brought up a relevant site first that wasn't SUMO. It only had instructions for Windows and since he was using a Mac he couldn't make it work. So he went back to the search results and chose the correct SUMO article which was the second result. Though both testers found SUMO relatively quickly it still seemed to happen a bit by accident in each case. The first tester was at a loss for what to do and tried looking in the Help menu in desperation. I think that working to make SUMO visible still needs to be a top priority.