Introduction to Web Publishing

ESPN Usability Report

By Matt Meier

The following is a usability report conducted with two users who underwent several tasks on ESPN.com. The tasks reflected the usability of the website and the users ability to quickly finish the tasks with as little difficulty as possible.

Matt Meier | Fall 2011

INTRODUCTION
This usability report focuses on two users experience with completing a set list of tasks for ESPN.com. The first user I labeled as a low-experience with ESPN.com, though he had a keen interest in sports, particularly football. In previous discussions with this user, he had mentioned wanting to try out for the NWMSU football team in the hopes of becoming a wide receiver. This user also seemed fairly adept at using the Internet, particularly as the test played, though he lacked some knowledge of certain features within the Internet. The second user I considered to be a high-experience user of ESPN.com, who had a very intense interest with sports and was always checking in at ESPN.com. In talking with the second user, he mentioned having an obsession with rugby and was always keeping up-to-date about the latest news in rugby, mainly by checking through ESPN.com. Both of these tests were conducted on a third floor lounge area in South Complex. Both subjects used the wireless Internet that is available to Northwest students on campus. The location of the lounge met a cross-section of two hallways, with a stairwell entrance and exit immediately within the lounge area. This confluence of the stairwell and two hallways created high levels of traffic at times, which contributed to distracting both male participants. Lighting of the lounge area was very reasonable and comfortable, with no over-saturation of lighting or dimness to be noticed. Both users sat on the same style of chairs available in the lounge area, with high armrests with a fair laid-back manner.

FIRST TEST SUBJECT

The first test subject was Travis Emerson, 19 years old. Travis used the school-issued laptops to conduct the tasks that I had given him, leaving the laptop on his lap, using the touch-pad for mouse control. For these tasks, Travis used Internet Explorer 9 as the web browser of choice. According to a brief interview with Travis prior to the test, he stated that he is not a common user of ESPN.com, but is a frequent watcher of ESPN on television. TASK 1 ANALYSIS Upon receiving the orders for Task 1, Travis immediately used Google to search. Travis used the Google Task Bar, located on the top-right side of the Internet Explorer 9 browser. Searching oakland raiders owner al davis dies, Travis scanned through the search results on the first page. He checked out a link from CNN.com, scanned the text briefly before being distracted by a group of girls as they passed by, calling his attention to them and talked with them briefly. Apparently not being satisfied, Travis tried a new Google search,
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how al davis dies. From there, he found a link to sfgate.com, where he scanned the text, visibly frustrated that he was not finding the result he was looking for. Dissatisfied, he navigated to ESPN.com to try to find relevant information to Al Davis death. The links that were brought up in ESPN have no relevant information to Al Davis death, it appears. Agitated, Travis eventually verbally asked another individual in the room, Andrew Benson (who I tested later), for the cause of death of Al Davis. Andrew did not seem to have the knowledge in mind to answer the question. Returning to an earlier Google search result on Al Davis death, Travis traveled to USAToday.com to try once more. But when not getting any information needed to complete Task 1, Travis gave up entirely and decided to move onto Task 2. TASK 2 ANALYSIS A lot of vocal distractions occur as Travis browsed leisurely through ESPN.com. Of note, he looked at web pages related to football rankings and mixed martial arts. During this period, he did have issues with his left clicker on the laptop, pounding hard several times to click on a link. I took note that he does not use the tap-to-click function that is a part of the touch-pad on the laptop. Part of my determination for the clicking issues are probably webrelated to ESPN.com, given that the clicker worked perfectly when completing the rest of the tasks. TASK 3 ANALYSIS Travis began his search by navigating to the NCAA football section of ESPN.com. He eventually found a schedule list of all the Division I games that were to be played during Week 8. Having noticed that the November 8 date was not listed, Travis had to click ahead to the Week 10 and Week 11 schedules to find the information needed to complete the task. This task was completed fairly briskly. TASK 4 ANALYSIS When I gave this task to Travis, his first reaction was to ask, What is an RSS? I withheld telling him directly, so as not to distract him at the moment. He first Googled rss feed, clicked on the Wikipedia page related to RSS, and read the content briefly. During this quick read, he verbally commented about why anyone would want to subscribe to Bill Simmons. After reading about RSS on Wikipedia, Travis went to ESPN to try to directly search for Bill Simmons RSS feed. Travis then went back to using Google to try and find Bill Simmons feed. He made several searches in Google rather quickly, changing a few keywords to find the best results. Travis never clicked past the page 1 results. He eventually found a link

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in JPButler.com that linked within the content to subscribing to Bill Simmons RSS feed. I verified this link to see if it proved correct, which I concluded it did. TASK 5 ANALYSIS Travis returned back to the ESPN homepage and proceeded to scan the content on the homepage, possibly looking for a link related to jobs at ESPN. He scrolled back up to the top of the homepage and searched jobs in espn. Travis scanned the results quickly, renewed his search with the keyword digital media and tried again. Once again, vocal distractions from passersby stole Travis attention for a while. Travis tried a new search again with jobs openings digital media and clicked on the first link shown. Within seconds, he clicked on another link on the top of the page, then clicked another link from there that took him to job postings within ESPN. Travis scanned the text and eventually came across listings within digital media. By this point in the test, Travis had become visibly annoyed with the tediousness of the tasks and the effort it took to finding results. He picked on of the digital media job postings, immediately found a button near the top of the job description that led him to applying for the job. TASK 6 ANALYSIS This task was, by far, the quickest to complete. Travis traversed back to the ESPN homepage and searched espn magazine. Within a couple of clicks, Travis was able to get a subscription for ESPN magazine. TASK 7 ANALYSIS Travis began this search by opening a new tab to Google, then clicked on Google Images. He searched drew moor, scanned the pictures that were immediately viewable and concluded that Drew Moor was a soccer player and played for Dallas, just by examining the pictures alone. TASK 8 ANALYSIS Travis once more used Google and searched walk the plank. No immediate links seem to get to the actual game, so Travis tacked on game as a search keyword with the previous keywords. The first link brought him to the game on ESPNs site. An a dvertisement immediately began playing prior to the game loading, with took 15 seconds for the ad to run through. Once the advertisement had finished, the game began to load, by rather slowly. I noticed that a large banner ad was at the top of the page, which presented itself with some animated graphics. I concluded that this graphics heavy banner ad was the probable cause for the slow download of the game.

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SECOND TEST SUBJECT

My second test subject was Andrew Benson, 19 years old. Andrew used his own personal laptop, a MacBook Pro to conduct the tasks, preferring to have the laptop rest on his lap and used the touch-pad for mouse control. The web browser of choice for Andrew was the Safari browser; I did not check to see which version of the browser Andrew was running. Andrew mentioned prior to the test that he was a heavy user of ESPN and was particularly into rugby. TASK 1 ANALYSIS Andrew began his search by Googling al davis. He opened the link to Wikipedia and jumped to the Death section by using the table of content links at the beginning of the article. After reading the bit on Al Davis death in Wikipedia, Andrew concluded that no cause of death had been listed yet. TASK 2 ANALYSIS With being a heavy user of ESPN, Andrew spent little time scanning the homepage of ESPN.com. He immediately navigated to the rugby page in ESPN. During this time, Andrews cell phone caused him to ignore ESPN for a short; Andrew even mentioned that cell phone use is a bit of a habit for him. After texting, Andrew went to the NFL page in ESPN. He scanned the photos that revolved through the main area of the page, that is to say the middle of the page and most of the page. He began criticizing ESPNs choice f or using the photographs on the NFL page, mainly pointing out how the composition of the photos was terrible and not professional. The verbal reactions of Andrew got Travis and another fellow talking about football amongst the three of them in the lounge area. Andrew then went to the GameHQ center in ESPN and looked up stats. TASK 3 ANALYSIS Andrew searches november 8th ncaa fb and was brought up to the Week 8 listings. He then jumped around from Week 12 to Week 11 before finally finding the results to complete Task 3. TASK 4 ANALYSIS Andrew began the search with bill simon in ESPN. Dissatisfied, he tagged in rss. The webpage loaded rather slowly for Andrew. During the wait, Andrew opened up a new tab in Safari to Google and search bill simon. He quickly discovered that Bill Simmon is the CEO for Wal-Mart and became somewhat confused at the search results. He clarified his search in Google with bill simon espn. Apparently becoming annoyed with the lack of viable
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links, Andrew went back to ESPN and went to the Site Map and clicked on Contact ESPN. He traveled from there to Customer Care, but was forced to enter personal information, which seemed too tedious for Andrew to enter, so he backed out of that webpage. Andrew tried Google once again by searching bill simon espn again. He then realized he had been spelling the name wrong all along and corrected to bill simmons espn and searched again in Google. From there, he found a link to Bill Simmons blog on ESPN, clicked on Bill Simmons profile and found links to Bill Simmons. Andrew clicked on one of the links and was brought to a webpage for ESPN feeds to Bill Simmons. TASK 5 ANALYSIS Andrew returned to the ESPN Site Map from earlier and went directly to Jobs at ESPN. He clicked on the Search Jobs tab, and then went to Jobs by Category. Andrew finds the jobs listings under digital media, clicked on a particular job and found the apply button. TASK 6 ANALYSIS Andrew searched within ESPN for espn the magazine. He immediately finds the link for subscribing. TASK 7 ANALYSIS Andrew searched Drew Moore within ESPN, but had trouble deleting text from the previous search of espn the magazine, which creates tension for Andrew. He scrolled through the webpage, scanned the content, and clicked on a picture. He then corrected his search to Drew Moor and found the right guy and concluded that he plays soccer. TASK 8 ANALYSIS Andrew searched walking the plank within ESPN and found the game. As with Travis, an advertisement plays preceding the loading of the game. The game takes a moment to load, but loads nonetheless.

CONCLUSIONS
My conclusions for this test overall are in regards to the heavy usage of Google for both users. Through the tests of Travis and Andrew, both individuals relied on Google on getting their answers to complete the tasks, at times. However, it appeared to me that Travis was a heavier user of Google than Andrew for most of the tasks. Travis began many of searches with Google, and when he could not find the answers directly within ESPN, he would change gears to using Google. Of interest was Travis use of the Go ogle Task Bar, an element that is an ad-on for Internet Explorer, which Travis used extensively for his searches.
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Andrew was a more adept individual with ESPN, where he began all of his searches using ESPN. Only when he could not find solid results in ESPN would Andrew switch to using Google for his searches. Andrew also seemed to be a more experienced user of the Internet, since he had the knowledge of knowing what an RSS feed was and navigating to ESPNs site map to find information. In my experience of using the web, I have rarely ever thought of using a websites site map to find relevant information. The web browser usage for each individual was also enlightening and worth noting. While both used rather low-spec browsers, each performed adequately well for the tasks, namely Internet Explorer 9. I noticed that Safari tended to run a bit slower than IE9, despite the fact that Andrews MacBook Pro had a higher spec layout than Travis school-issued laptop. The only thing that hurt both browsers were the slow download times for the Walk the Plank game on ESPN; IE9 seemed slower to download, possibly due to the lower graphics processor that runs in the laptop. In terms of efficiency, several of the tasks proved quite laborious to complete. For Travis, three of the tasks were very difficult for him to complete. The first task, searching for Al Davis cause of the death, required many searches and much scanning, though Travis used Google almost entirely for this task. Perhaps it should be noted that no direct cause of death had been noted at the time for Al Davis death, which probably kept Travis on the search to figure out why Al Davis had passed. Task 4 and Task 5 were also difficult for Travis; the lack of knowledge on RSS kept Travis from finding the RSS feed for Bill Simmons and not searching correctly for jobs at ESPN in the digital media sector kept Travis from finding the correct information. Andrew proved much more efficient at web browsing and completing the tasks. The only difficulties that arose with Andrew were trying to find an RSS feed for Bill Simmons, which required many searches over and over. However, Andrews incorrect spelling of Simmons to Simons prevented him from completing this task quickly and efficiently. Perhaps had the spelling been correct, Andrew could have found the correct information sooner. Part of this error can be attributed to me, since I had not clarified with Andrew on the proper spelling of Simmons. And in terms of errors, Travis would take the win for most errors. Most of the errors for Travis stemmed from him incorrectly searching for information; Travis began many of his searches in a very basic manner, then would revise his searches a few times before he either found what he was looking for or begin a new search entirely. In conclusion, I found that ESPN is well-catered to the sports individual who is already familiar with the ESPN site. However, ESPN does not appear to be well-suited for less
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experienced web users who do not commonly visit the ESPN site. The ESPN search function and layout of the site and content work quite well and are pleasing, though some of the more tedious content, such as RSS feeds and jobs listings, could be made more visible with an easy search.