User Testing For iCan

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours at BBC Bush House taking part in a ‘user testing’ session for the iCan [Update: now called Action Network] website. It was co-incidentally the same day as the Hutton Report results came out, damning the BBC in favour of the government, and so the mood was pretty sombre, with plasma screens blaring out the bad news:

Nevertheless, the session went ahead. I was intrigued by the way it was set up. I sat at a computer with a member of staff either side of me. One was a usability expert, guiding me through the session by asking me to complete several tasks, the second was a Senior Broadcast Journalist working on the site, who took notes of what I did and said.

I’d visited the site a couple of times before, and so knew my way around the site a bit, though there were still a few things that I’d forgotten. Going through the tasks was valuable though, in that I could give comments on how easy the site was to use, and how I made sense of the layout and functionality.

One interesting thing that came up was their colour scheme. The front page shows that the site is divided up into four different types of content which are colour coordinated. These are labelled ‘find info’, ‘find people’, ‘take action’ and ‘your space’. I commented at the start that these divisions didn’t seem all that natural, with the info and action sections seeming to crossover. What’s more, ‘people’ pages, like mine, appear in orange, not yellow, this being apparently to distinguish members of the public from staff and organisation leaders (though I haven’t seen any of those on site).

We also identified some other confusing procedures, such as adding categories to your article, creating an article (there are hardly any links for this), attaching articles to campaigns, and getting the site to remember your postcode (currently a technical problem).

A more deep issue, which I tried to bring up at the end, was the level and ease of communication with other people on the site. Everyone working within the site is keen to stress that it is not a community site, and instead is intended as a tool to let people find out information on how to take action, and to meet other people who they can join up with. It’s this second part which I have a problem with though - as the information element could be presented just as easily as a flat site. If users are really going to meet like-minded people on the site with who they can form a small local group, you need to provide the tools for them to communicate effectively. The BBC is happy for this communication to effectively happen off-site, perhaps by e-mail, over the phone, or down the pub. However, for users to get to the stage where this happens, they need to be able to make those crucial first introductions and discussions online. This is where the site is lacking. People can join your campaign, but once they do you are limited to personal one-to-one communications and the ability for all members to contribute to a campaign journal. There’s no forum which all members can use to discuss plans or times to meet, leaving you with no easy way in fact to have those crucial many-to-many communications which communities are based on.

I think this is a shame, as the site does offer some advanced tools, such as the ability to assign roles to members of a campaign, basic votes, postcode-based noticeboards (which are great for those very-local issues), self-categorisation and the ability to share information.

My suspicion is that the biggest factor holding the site back is a worry over moderation controversies. The campaign pages feature very prominent disclaimers (appearing even before the title) and a change in the site-wide grey bar stating ‘this webspace has been provided by BBCi for iCan campaigns’. Their current online user survey also asks questions of whether you see the BBC as endorsing campaigns. In the wake of the Hutton report, it’s easy to see why the BBC is cautious about any political beliefs which might be attached to it, but yet if this site is to work, fulfilling a remit of promoting and enabling local political action, these fears will have to be put on the backburner. With BBCi hosting a wide-range of messageboards and user-content, users will see the difference between BBC content and user content. Several other big sites provide community tools, the most popular being MSN Groups and Yahoo Groups, and in those cases it’s clear that neither Yahoo nor MSN is connected with their content. The difference is the BBC’s role as a trusted broadcaster, and the fact that they offer moderation. If it is within the BBC’s remit to offer community hosting and online service provision, and I think it should be, then iCan is a step in the right direction, but needs to embrace the community aspects of the site if it is to actually become useful.

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