Usability Test of Teacher Created Website

In older generations, parents lived by the saying “no news is good news”. Many parents only received calls when the teacher felt the child was struggling in school or had a difficult day. However, as times change so does the parents’ presumption. Today, parents expect to have ongoing communication with their child’s teacher. In order to create effective, consistent and proactive communication with parents of a 3rd grade class, a classroom website was be designed. This website is aimed to promote curriculum, to provide resources, and important school information. The purpose of this usability study is to evaluate the navigation, easy of use and effectiveness of a teacher-created website to inform 3rd grade parents about what their child is learning in the classroom. Two rounds of usability testing captured the user interaction with the teacher-created website using the think aloud protocol and mouse movement. Pre and post surveys collected user satisfaction and demographic data. Data analysis included task completion and both quantitative and qualitative user evaluations. Usability issues were resolved over the two rounds of usability testing with improvements made to the prototype in between each round. The results showed an increase in navigation, easy of use and effectiveness of this teacher-created website. Findings support the effectiveness of usability testing in the design of simple, user friendly teacher-created websites that provides open communication between teacher and parents.