Usability at IGN

I was immediately back in the air after the IA Summit and on my way to San Francisco. It was tiring but I was looking forward to participating in IGN's very first usability test. We would be testing out our brand new video player.

It was a little hectic and wasn't as smooth as I would've liked it to be, but with only a week and a half to prepare and recruit we tried to make the best out of it. Here are some issues we ran into:

• The tasks we came up with were last minute and aligning them with what product wanted wasn't as tight as it could've been. We tried to remedy this by simply adjusting tasks as we went along.


• We started out with a drawing exercise to see if the user could draw or write out their experiences of watching a video. Most kinda fumbled around with this and couldn't quite remember certain features. So the second day we switched to simply getting comments on other popular video sites such as YouTube, CNN, and Gametrailers and found users were able to provide much more general feedback.


• Be prepared--we seemed to be searching for pens, papers, webex wasn't connected, compensation wasn't ready, etc. Next time we'll be prepared!


• I wasn't so sure about having team members (PM, Dev, etc.) in the room with us during sessions. I felt this would distract the user, but we wanted to expose them to usability. We'll probably setup a remote viewing room (Note: we should leverage our video team!)

There were a couple other things but it was mostly administrative stuff that we could've avoided. But all in all I feel we came away with a positive experience--exposing our team to usability, working out some bugs in our process, and coming away with some action items to make improvements to the product.

Welcome to IGN!


The video team out for lunch.


Makeshift usability lab.