Drupal and usability testing (eye movement registration)

On March 3, 2008, formal usability testing for Drupal was conducted in the usability laboratory of the University of Technology in Minnesota. The laboratory allowed us to record the data of the eye movement recording camera.



The heat map shows where users viewed within the first 5 seconds after opening the main page of the administrative module. Red crosses show where users clicked the mouse.
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The blue dot on the video shows what the user sees on the account creation page. Several users panicked off the screen when red labels appeared, which they perceived as a message about erroneous actions.

The real discovery was to see how users constantly fail on tasks that were considered the simplest (creating new content, adding a new account). You need to be honest and admit that these are errors of Drupal and not of users. The good news is that developers have received a long list of usability problems that they are going to fix.

A detailed test report is available here buytaert.net/files/usability-testing-minnesota.pdf (139 pages, 6 megabytes)

Source: buytaert.net/first-results-from-usability-testing