American Civil Liberties Union
Classmate Testing Report

Target Market
The target audience will be all citizens concerned with personal rights. They are various ages and from various income levels. This site should be visually appealing to attract the general public. Target market examples include: ACLU members, potential members, students entering essay contest, general public looking for information about the ACLU.
Testing Respondents
Respondents include: Center for Well Being: Kristi Anderson, Heather Dubin; Puente Project: Bonnie Chun, Patricia Seaton, Kent Ward; SRJC Bookstore: Wendy Hecker, Carol Ho, Anne Petteford, Ivan Todd; Other: Irene Harper, Adaptive PE.

The following are people we did not hear from for the report: Center for Well Being: Tracy Beeman and Jeni Pucillo (late); Puente Project: Melissa Gonzales; SRJC Bookstore: Sebastian Amiet.

We had 13 assigned testers and received 10 responses and 1 submital from an unassigned group. Testing dates from Monday, November 18th through Tuesday, November 26th. After this date I received an e-mail from 3 students who said they had sent their response but I had no record of receiving the information. Late submittals received on Monday, December 2nd from Jeni Pucillo. Comments reviewed but too late to include in results.
Conditions of Testing
Computer Operating System Monitor/Bitdepth/Resolution Browser Internet
PC 535 Mz Windows 98 17", 24 bit IE 6 56k
HP Windows XP 17", 32 Bit, 800X600 IE 6 Net 4.7 56k
Mac ibook OS 9.1 12" IE 5 56k
Compaq Laptop Windows 98 13", 16 bit Net 6 56k
Dell Dimension 8100 Windows ME 17", 800x600 IE 5.017 56k
Gateway GP7-500 Windows 98 17", 16 bit, 1024x768 IE 5 1.5Mb Cable
PC Pentium II Windows 98 17" 16 bit IE 6 56k
Dell 8200 Windows 2000 19", 32 bit, 1024x768 IE 6.0 56k


Questions
What is the site about?
The site is about the ACLU and it's involvement with protection of civil rights and civil liberties.

The site informs viewers about civil rights, what's up with the latest civil issues, and how interested people can get involved.

The ACLU organization fights for the civil rights of American citizens.

American Civil Liberties Union Northern California affiliate.

What was your first impression of the home page?
Wow! Really - that was my reaction. It grabs you. Very professional-looking. Dramatic color scheme - I think it really fits the client.

Bold. Big. Clean. American. Love the colors.

The homepage is upfront and dramatic.

Very professional, attractive home page.

I really liked the graphic with the statue of liberty and the American flag.

Crisp, organized, institutional.

I think the homepage is very clean, makes a bold statement, kind of along the lines of the ACLU in itself.

Were did you first click?
Annual Dinner and Civil Liberties Issues.

Essay contest link.

About this chapter page.

Get involved page. I wanted to see how to participate after reading what ACLU was about.

Civil liberties issues button.

Civil Liberty Issues link on the left, then once in that page, clicked on "The Death Penalty".

Did you find the site easy to navigate?
Very

Yes

The only thing that didn't stand out were the links within the text because it was hard to distinguish the colors of the links and the fact that they aren't underlined.

 

What is the overall tone and feel of the site?

Very professional with a clean appealing design especially on the home page.

Action-oriented, simple yet chock-full of good information that is well-formatted.

It came across to me very clean and professional looking and peaked my interest!

Very precise and informational yet layed out in a way that did not overwhelm me with information. I very much like the way the space was used and the short paragraphs of information and statistics made it easy information to read through.

Yes, Most were chock-full of quality content.

Wants people to join; to inform others of their rights.

The feeling I get is "We have something important to say." And, that's true.

Crisp, organized, aggressive dominant colors.

Comfortable.

 

Were the pages interesting? Why or why not?

I like the clean, uncluttered look yet with splashed of strong colors and interesting image layouts. The logo is very strong and clean as well and I like it very much.

Very. I found the text and pages well organized. I liked being able to either delve into a topic (that was linked to more description) or not as I felt. I stayed on this site for awhile. A lot of work had to have gone into this. There's a lot here.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a copy of the Constitution and Bill of Rights on the site.
Yes, I didn't know such a program existed to help with such cause.

Very clean cut, organized razor sharp. I think the pages were interesting just with the information provided within them. would find this site interesting.

Yes -- lots of great links (ie, american civil liberties union) and information that people can get to without having known where to go before. This is like a one-stop shopping for people who are into this sort of thing.

About the Chapter was boring because it was just a list of names.

 

Did you find what you expected from the pages?

Yes

More actually. I thought such a site would be boring. The page about Civil Liberties Issues is great in that it just gives teasers about what the issues are and link to more information but didn't overwhelm me.

The pages were more political than I expected.

They seemed to make sense.

Liberties Issues is great in that it just gives teasers about what the issues are and link to more information but didn't overwhelm me.

Yes. I expected to see a little more on the 'About the Chapter' page - a little more personal description.

 

Could you find information on the Essay Contest and Contest Resources?

Yes I just clicked the essay contest link.

Yes, click the essay contest page. Inside, the contest resources page is right above the navigation bar.

Essay Contest-very evident from the home page. I was expecting contest resources further down the page, after a description of the contest.

 

What did you think of the second-level pages?

Shows consistency with design and are well organized.

Good information and easy to read. Nice layout.

The graphic is pared down nicely to show this is a second-level.

I think the second level pages look good, very clean like the home page.

Nice use of scale and juxtaposition of images but it falls a little on the second level; I wanted more image variation

I would have liked to see the main graphic rollover to more images on the second level pages to break up the enormous amount of content.

Visually striking, very clear, un-utilized white space at the top right of the page I kept expecting to be used for something.

 

Were the third level links easy to find and use?

Yes

The 3rd level links were easy to find and navigate.

They were in an unexpected place; they worked well.

What did you think of the newsletters in PDF format?

I like the PDF newsletters -- they look awesome, the text and pictures come across so clear. You guys did a great job on these.

I really like PDFs, they look so nice. Great - this added another level to the site for exploring.

Took a while to load, but looked good once loaded. Good idea, but they took awhile to load (10-15 seconds). If you use PDF format, you need to inform viewers they need the acrobat reader to read. I suggest you include a link to acrobat reader where people can download it if they don't already have one.

Did you see any images missing? If yes, which page(s)?
No, majority response.

Yes, on the Winter 2002 Newsletter on page 3, the Rohnert Park City Logos are missing.

In the home page, the picture of Statue of Liberty has a line across it, making photo look like it was pieced together.

 

Regarding download time of each page? Did any pages take an aggravating long time to load? If so, which ones?
Pages loaded quickly.

No, they loaded within 2-5 seconds.

Just the newsletters.

Did you find any links not working? If so which link and on what page? What was the error message received?

No, majority response.

The home button on the Annual Dinner page gave me the 404 error that the page could not be found.

What did you like best about the site?

I liked the crispness of the graphics and the clarity of the information and its organization.

The pages were kept clean, simple and very informative.

The ease of readability and navigation. I also like the professional feel though.

I like the organization of the Constitution page a lot.

I like the home page the most; Dramatic On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give this site a 20. I am that impressed.

I liked the home page graphic the best.

I like the colors and the design the best.
Please give 3 words to describe the site.
Attractive … functional … impressive

Clean, professional, informative.

American. Bold. Professional.

Warm, Informative & Inviting; good blend of colors.

Professional, informative, good blends of colors.

Dramatic, serious, "has a mission".

 

What suggestions for improvements do you have?

Nice job guys!

Some of the links are not visible enough in the civil liberties page because the colors are too similar. Make them more distinctive.

Take out some of the PDF files (like reservation for annual dinner; change to a form instead if possible) for they are taking a long time to open.

The large amount of content really was a turn-off. Break up text with a sub head or add color to break up the paragraph sections on each page.

The rollover orange and the nav which identifies which page your on bothered me. When you're scrolling and your cursor is near the orange identifier...it's confusing. I'm being real nick-picky.

Have navigation bar on the left instead of right side. Eyes hard to adjust, and rolling my eyes over to see the menu bar is losing my interest with the site, especially when I have to scroll first.

Summary
We are pleased with the results received from the classmate questionnaire. The design layout, color scheme, graphics, organization and clarity effectively contributed to the professional, informative and easy to navigate site. We have already corrected the following problems and/or suggestions that respondents indicated: Pdf's were noted as such, link colors were adjusted and third level links were changed to classes for easy identification. Also, the active link rollover color has been changed to blue. We agree there is a large amount of content and implemented our recommendations to the client for better clarity of content without compromising his design perspective. We will discuss adding sub heads for the Constitution page due to its length.. Forms were originally created for the Annual Dinner and Get Involved page along with the use of PayPal. However, the client chose not to utilize these format processes. Therefore, Pdf documents were provided. Overall, we are pleased with the final results of our site for the ACLU.