Design Ethiopia

Several things need to happen before you can even begin to think about launching your web site. Functional specifications must be created, formalized testing procedures need to be in place, test completion criteria should be met, and methods for reporting and making changes must be in place.

Task-Based Testing
Examining the processes that users will most likely be interested in and ensuring that they occur flawlessly is the goal of this type of testing. This is not a completely comprehensive approach to testing, but rather a matter of placing emphasis on exploring the most common paths of the web site.

You should focus on testing the possible paths a user might take through the web site for the most common or critical tasks. Develop some specific questions that the user might have and then evaluate whether or not users could achieve these goals.

For example, a library site may expect the users to find directions to the site, find the database of documents and successfully search and find an item, and perhaps find contact information in order to call the library.

Draft a formal of the process tasks and results tasks that users should be able to achieve. You can then test that each of the processes can be achieved in a reasonable way, note those that are problematic, and use your formalized feedback mechanisms to alert the whole design team of problems.

This method is not guaranteed to catch every problem with your web site. However, it will help to identify the larger issues and will let you know if your major tasks can be achieved.

It will not test every possible behavioral path through the site. Task-based testing often catches the most glaring problems – that is, those related to the subset of tasks you’ve chosen to investigate – and is more useful in the early stages of design. The best testing will occur with a suite of tests that includes both task-based testing and amore comprehensive testing process.