Journal entry for Thursday, June 21, 2001
Today's summary: In my "Writing for the Web" class today.
I was in a training class all day today ("Writing for the Web").
It continues till tomorrow. I thought it would be a pretty fluffy
class, but actually it's turning out surprisingly well. The instructor
has great suggestions to test your site's design. Such as... giving
somebody an identity and some tasks to complete, and seeing if they
can find the appropriate webpages.
So, I used the NIAID
Council News website as my example. The identity was "You are
a scientist researching AIDS, and you want a grant from NIAID, the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease". The tasks
I figured were important:
- Find out what the "NIAID Council" actually IS.
- Find contact information for AIDS program officials.
- Find out how to write a grant.
- Find information on human subjects requirements.
- Subscribe to the newsletter.
So as the "scientist" tried to navigate through the site, they
talked aloud about why they picked one site over another. Very interesting
experiment... revealing results... etc. Probably not quite as good
as having a real user there, but, still.
I'm really too busy to write much else. Commission for Denver,
whurrgh!
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