Description:
Smartgirl.org was moving to Drupal. I joined the team as a Drupal API specialist in order to re-design and improve a survey and survey analysis application that had existed on the old site.
Skills used:
PHP, MySQL, R, Drupal API, jQuery, HTML, CSS, Usability testing
Case Study
Smartgirl.org is a NSF / U of M sponsored website that encourages girls ages 11 – 17 to develop and interest in the sciences. The SmartGirl clients decided it was time to switch to a better and more extensible CMS, and to make usability improvements to the learning software on the site.
The team consisted of a Drupal configuration expert, a graphic designer, a project manager and me, a Drupal API specialist. While the others focused on the general features and workflow of the site, I focused on elements that required deeper customization in PHP.
The most unique feature of the original Smartgirl.org was a survey application that allowed users to actually do statistics on the survey responses. For example, they could test whether age had an influence on hours spent shopping, etc. This part of the site had frightful usability problems that prevented it from being used to its fullest extent.
My work on this part of the site involved both coding and design, as I attempted to make the complex process of running statistical tests as simple and fun as possible. Throwing in a bit of common sense, a bit of AJAX/jQuery and an improved workflow, I came up with a version suitable for testing.
Usability test
The video below is a “greatest hits” of a usability test I conducted in order to find ways to improve my design. The original test took about 20 minutes.
User testing finds bugs and problems that you never would have discovered on your own. Especially when you are implementing a design yourself, you tend to unconsciously shun certain workflows that you know are buggy or have bad usability, but users aren’t so nice!
Statistics in PHP … oh no … but wait, there’s R!
I’m not a math person, so I was really worried about setting up PHP to run statistical tests. Fortunately, I was able to run R commands on the server from my PHP scripts in Drupal. R is a great language for plowing through data, and who knew it could run its own MySQL queries? On the browser side, FusionCharts (http://fusioncharts.com) provided some great visualizations.