Evaluation Completed by: Gary Thompson and Paul Zablosky
Date: August 22, 2007
Environment/URL: MyUBC uPortal 2.5.3
uPortal: Public/Guest page, Login, UBC WebMail, Logout
Persona: Ed McClellan, Undergraduate
Ed is a first time user of the portal. Ed has just completed a non-portal registration process and has been assigned a UBC CWL (student) account and an email account through the registration process and is familiar with those terms. Ed expects to access his UBC email via the portal, but does not know the scope and ability of the portal in relation to his being a student at the institution. Ed is accessing the portal via his laptop in a corner of the student union building through the wireless network.
User Expectations & Conventions
Ed has just completed his first-time student registration process and is now going to the portal to check his institution email for the first time. Ed is also curious about what online services UBC has to offer and what the university portal is like.
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Ed might consider leafing through the other tabs to see what other content and functionality is available to him; in this review he does not
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B - surface up links in the login box
B - increase font size, too small for visually impaired
C - tested change in font size, if user has custom stylesheet or screen magnifier; does okay for a webapp, but has some issues - larger font moves tabs around, content shifts
C - tabs visually break at 4-5x magnification
C - + for focus starting in the login form
C - tabbing through page; loses focus in certain places in the tab order, tab order should be more logical and obvious
G - when lost in the tab order, hit Enter and minimized the news channel - with no visual indicator, it seemed to suddenly remove the content of the channel
C - had no content in the News channel in Firefox
C - links should be more contextual than "here" (e.g., click here)
C - tab order is confused by the channel icons/controls; removing unnecessary features would be good (e.g., shade/unshade)
C - aside from the color, the error message is not otherwise labeled as such (should test with a screen reader and see if the error message is prominent enough)
C/B - red color of the error message matches the form input labels - should not use the same color for error messages as normal content
B - preferences not clear, header information not clear (e.g., header links not formatter or underlined)
C - tab order starts with the header/system links rather than content
C - term "webmail" should be simplified to "mail" for greater recognition and clarity
C - lack of quick navigation features (no skipping, much tabbing to get to certain functions)
C - basic tab ordering is decent
C - would be good to have a function to tab-cycle through the portlets
P - suggested clicking on the Student Service Centre link; this launches a new window and loads content
C - similar branding and interface, enough similarity to make the connection, but clearly is a break from one interface to another
C - communication of when leaving the portal (or returning) is important
C - signaling the spawn of a new window
C - two sets of tabs is troubling
C - chrome distracting (and unnecessary?) when there is only one channel
P - suggested looking at the focused view
B - not what the user expects
C - loss of main navigation disturbing
C - settings now more obvious
C - focused view could be more focused (less header, extraneous information) and tabbing gets quickly into the content
C - not apparent what all the tasks on the task bar do or are related to (initially recognized it to be a legend)