How to recruit students for user testing at sussex university, the Stuart method.
1. go to facebook
2. look at a friend
3. look at their ‘Networks with the most friends’
4. click on the one called ’sussex.uni’ (if they have it) – this will show you all their friends that go to / have gone to or work at sussex uni
The most difficult bit is telling if you know or might have met the student from their tiny photo, but we got a really good response.
Categories: skillclouds · user testing
Tagged: facebook, social-network, user recruitment, user testing
As part of the skillclouds user research session we discovered there is a very specific time when the majority of students will actually want to access information on their skills, course details and grades – mainly motivated by filling in a CV or application for further study.
This time of readiness is different in all students, be it for a work placement in the first year, a summer holiday job in the second year, or a to assess which parts of a course to take next. This makes it very difficult to predict.
Bombarding students with information before this can actually prove detrimental.
My old colleague Pete Gale from Cogapp gave a recent Sussex HCT group presentation showing information from some projects we had been involved with in the health care sector and the aftermath brought up some interesting parallels.
The readiness to change ruler
Healthcare patients information motivation can be measured on a readiness-to-change ruler, with information being delivered at the point of motivational ‘epoch’.
After the peak is often too late.
Delivering information before users are ready leads to overexposure and a numbness which reduces the chances of the information having any impact.
The same ideas prove true in student motivation. It’s a very difficult thing to predict, so we have an interesting question ;
When are students ready to receive skills information ?
Categories: skillclouds · user experience
Tagged: user motivation, user research
Everyone one likes to know what a link will do b4 u click it.
So we now have lovely icons (thanks to css) that tell us if a link is a pdf, jpg, mp3 or whatever.
I’m not completely convinced by it all as an accessibility thing, but i like tiny pixel drawings as much as the next person 
We also have icons identifying an external link / resource, but what i was looking for is a different ICON that says “I’m a local resource, but when you click me I happen to open in a new window”. Got css, need icon.
The nice people on the brighton new media list sent me in the direction of this on latest7
and this less 2.0 version
It would be nice to have a standard for these little icons.
Categories: accessibility
Tagged: accessibility, icons
