Summary of reviews on the Website Outsourcing Evaluation document

This page contains a summary of the feedback provided by the TDWG Executive Committee and TDWG Subgroup Conveners regarding the TIP documents submitted for review in Dec 2005.

Reviewer: Jessie Kennedy

• Outsourcing the usability testing will give limited feedback and they should consider typical end-users of the system to do some evaluation - to ensure people can find what they want rather than what a company might think the users want.
  • Part of a professional usability test is to recruit testers who are considered typical end-users of the system. So that should not be a real concern if the contractor has a well known track record in usability testing.

• The usability testing should include the management aspects of the www site, not just normal members who won't be updating anything on it.
  • Most definately, yes. However, the team will be limited in terms of the changes that can be made to the administration user interfaces being evaluated (i.e., Typo3 CMS, TWiki, or GNU Mailman). If significant usability issues are identified in the user interface of those tools, the team can do the following:
    1. Report those issues back to the respective development teams in the hope that they will address them timely;
    2. Fix the issues independently of the respective development team and report the issue, submitting the code patch for evaluation;
    3. Adopt another package that does not have the usability issues identified.

• Typo3 extensions should really be implemented by the TIP Team instead of a contractor. The effort of writing specifications for external contractors and managing them seems a waste of time.
  • Agreed. The TIP Team will most likely implement any required Typo3 extensions.

-- RicardoPereira - 06 Jan 2006