Ed and I met with the Accessibility and Usability team yesterday, part of MIT’s Information Services and Technology (IS&T), one of the departments on campus that makes the institute go. We met with Katherine Wahl and Chris LaRoche, usability consultants, and Stephani Roberts, accessibility consultant. They work as consultants with projects across the institute — both department sites and smaller projects and we went to speak with them about Vojo.co. (http://ist.mit.edu/usability and http://ist.mit.edu/accessibility)

We had emailed before meeting, and when we arrived at the office, Katherine, Chris and Stephanie asked us what Vojo is. Question 1: Do people understand what Vojo is from the site? Answered.

We walked through sending stories and setting up accounts and the team was excited about the possibilities of the tool and about possibilities for testing it. We’ll get to testing in July after we launch 1.0 with the solid feature set and retheming work that we’re underway with and after the Accessibility and Usability team’s schedule has some opening in it.

Some ideas about what a review may include:

Accessibility review “under the hood” — checking to make sure that the site is coded in a way that works well for hearing and vision assistant tools
Usability testing with people to assess if people understand what Vojo is from the front page and content on the site
Test phone interaction — sending stories, creating accounts, listening to stories
Test web interaction — group admin tasks like setting up groups, managing accounts, curating stories, communicating with group members

The team has in-office testing space complete with an observation room where people can test sites and a separate room from which the team can observe the testers. We spoke about potentially using that facility and also doing tests out “in the field.”

We’ll want to bring in some of our partners to participate in this review. We already receive most of our feedback about user experience from groups using Vojo.co and it would be ideal to bring them into the process of giving, capturing, and translating feedback from users’ experience of Vojo.co into design suggestions.

The plan is to design the studies between now and end of July and to to begin at the end of July.

We learned that yesterday was Global Accessibilty Awareness Day: http://www.globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/