Drupal and usability testing (registration of eye movements)

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



The heat map shows where users looked during the first 5 seconds after opening the main page of the administrative module. Red crosses show where users clicked with the mouse.



The blue dot on the video shows what the user sees on the account creation page. Several users panickedly bounced 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 simple (creating new content, adding a new account). You need to be honest and acknowledge that these are Drupal errors, not users. The good news is that the developers have a long list of usability issues 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