Before finalizing the site, collect user feedback through lightweight user interviews and team feedback. Both @apaskulin and @KBach are working on this task.

To do:

• Finalize interview questions
• Schedule interviews
• Share with the Data Products team for review
• Conduct interviews
• Process feedback
• Fix areas for improvement
• Get feedback from Data Product team
  • Site approved by @VirginiaPoundstone via Slack
  • Site approved by @mforns

User research findings

We conducted five interviews from a range of user types.

What worked well

• Users understood the subject of the site and the use cases of the API.
• Users were able to complete tasks given to them in the interviews quickly and without hesitation.
• Users appreciated the overall design of the site, particularly dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, heading anchor links.
• Users were able to use navigation elements to effectively explore the site, including the call-to-action button on the homepage, navigation sidebar, "next page" button at the bottom of the page, and “Edit this page” links.
• Users liked the interactive elements of the site, particularly the TRY buttons and curl command example. Although only some users understood that sandboxes were per endpoint and needed to be clicked to be expanded.
• Users liked the content provided by the site, particularly the concept pages, troubleshooting guide, and tutorials.
• Users liked the featured apps shown on the homepage: Wikistats and Page Views

Areas for improvement

Prioritized to fix as part of project scope:

• The base URL on the getting started guide is formatted in a way that implies it works as a link.
• It was unclear that the sandbox sections needed to be expanded and that they were per endpoint.
• Sandboxes didn’t look editable. “Fill example” button was confusing because examples were already filled.
• Repeating “requests per second” in the rate limit table seemed unnecessary.
• Improve the contrast of the TRY button text on button color in dark mode.
• The call to action button on the homepage 404s when opened in a new tab.
• Stretch goal: Truncated section headings in the table of contents are confusing.

Noted but decided not to fix as part of project scope due to technical feasibility, schedule, or edge cases:

• Endpoint names should be as similar as possible to make it easier to distinguish between them. (For example: “List pages with the highest page views” instead of “List most-viewed pages”)
• Since the images on the homepage were small, expected to be able to click on the images and have them expand, or alternatively act as links to the tools.
• Reader mode in Firefox not working.
• Expected an image on the tutorials pages of the resulting graphs.
• The endpoint description within the sandbox was hard to notice.
• Search didn’t lead to correct pages due to a lot of the same terms being present on several pages.
• Sandbox was visually overwhelming.
• In the sandbox preview bar, the text wrapping on endpoint names breaks words.
• Search results looked counterintuitive.
• No tooltip for TRY button in sandbox.
• Would have liked more links between pages. For example, links to reference pages on concept pages.
• Too much padding on sidebar causes the scroll bar to appear when there’s no content to scroll to.