usability lab
As mentioned here before, the del.icio.us team is presently in the midst of a major project: building a new platform which will speed up the site and help us grow even faster. At the same time we’re also taking a close look at our UI and exploring ways to make it both easier to use and more functional. Over the years we’ve heard a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. Many folks like the simple and terse nature of the site, while others take issue with certain elements of the design (shockingly, some of you think that light-blue-on-salmon-pink is not a good color combination; more shockingly, some of you think that it is). Our challenge then is to make del.icio.us better without messing up the stuff that already works.
We’ve been working on some new design ideas and recently conducted a series of usability tests to see if these ideas work. We brought in about a dozen people, both existing users and a few people who were new to del.icio.us. Yahoo! (our parent company) has some great facilities for this sort of thing which we basically moved into and hogged for about a week. It was a lot of fun for us (and, it seemed, for the participants), and we learned a lot from watching people use the site and try out our new designs. As we expected, we heard feedback all across the spectrum, and nearly all of it is proving deeply useful in our continuing work.
Here’s some stats from the tests:
- 20 participants
- Over 2000 post-it notes used
- 562 unique observations recorded
- Hundreds of design tweaks made as a result of feedback
- 62 cups of drip coffee and 23 lattes consumed
- Most disappointing thing overheard: “I don’t really get tags”
- Most gratifying thing overheard: “del.icio.us has totally changed my life”
- Funniest thing overheard: “I’m pleased; this new design doesn’t look like an angry fruit salad”
In the very near future we’re going to have a beta of the new design so we can get even more feedback (watch this space for announcements). Please also feel free to use this blog to share your thoughts about what you’d like to see different in del.icio.us. More cowbell? Less pink? Let us know.
Stephen Hood
Product Manager
88 comments July 9th, 2007
