This week’s assignment was an interesting experiment using Loop11.  I didn't have a very positive experience because unfortunately it wouldn't play nice with yelp.com but I can see it has some uses.  As with any test, I started the planning offline and built the test separately from the platform.  Once I made to Loop11, I liked that I was able to choose between questions and tasks.  Loop11 had a comprehensive list of question types which was useful in setting up diverse questions. So far I like the reporting interface; it’s very easy to understand.  I do miss not being able to have open ended task questions to observe behavior but I think that is more of an issue of unmoderated vs. moderated testing.  For example, one of my original tasks started as: “You are considering moving to the outskirts of Seattle but aren't quite where to move.  Use yelp.com to find an area with restaurants that offer your favorite food/dishes within a walking distance.”

I tried to add a little humor as I wouldn't expect restaurants to be one of the primary reasons to move somewhere for most people but I could be wrong.  The expectation here was the people would have to browse through several reviews and find additional information on each place which I hypothesize is closer to what people normally do.  In addition to that, I wanted people to have some involvement in the task.  Instead, I had to turn the task into:

“You are considering moving to Southeast Portland so you would like to find more information on family friendly restaurants in the area. Use yelp.com to find the highest rated family friendly Mexican restaurant in that area.”