Hi All,
We just finished a round of user testing on two designs intended to improve the scanability of pages and help people understand the structure of our pages better. I wanted to provide an update for those who are curious.
A few interesting things we learned:
- Regular users have a really clear mental model of our page structure.
- People are not unhappy scrolling around the page to find what they want.
- Hardly anyone uses the “In this article” section, and those that do only use it to get to a part of the page they already know is there.
- Testers interacted with the line-length changes that are currently in beta without remarking on them. (Except one who said it was easier to read without being able to say why they felt that way.)
As testing moves forward we’re going to:
- Move forward with the line-length changes currently in beta which give us more room for code examples.
- Remove the “In this article” section from all pages.
- On reference pages, make links to common sections available in a new format.
- Improve the ability of users to find headings when scrolling up and down the page (this will benifit the Learning area too!).
This is the “round 3” version that we are testing today:
If you want to see it yourself it’s on staging until 11:30 Pacific Time. Remember it’s a prototype, we’re not looking for bugs reports.
Some things we’re still thinking about:
- This works best when people know what sections are on the page. How do we handle pages which have unfamiliar sections? (Example: Array generic methods)
- How does this work with narrower screens?
Thanks,
Stephanie.