[Testing] Testing w/ kids - starting this Sat.

[Mel Chua]

Thanks for the writeup, Frances! Ccing the testing list in case anyone's 
curious about how things went. (Also, the kid-testing was Joe's idea; I 
just got it to happen at the Museum this Saturday.)
>
> There were a number of volunteers at the scene
Note - the Boston-area OLPC group (MassXO) runs this station at the 
Museum every Saturday from 1-4, so we were really piggybacking off their 
event. ;)
> The questionnaire was much too long and detailed. We never even got 
> anyone using it as we decided early on that this particular day should 
> be our observation day where we see what the foot traffic is like, get 
> a sense of what the students like and see how the testing may work in 
> this given environment...our "baseline" in a sense.
That's good to know too - I really didn't expect the questionnaire to 
work as planned; it was to give us a strawman to try out things against, 
and something to do/observe by default if nothing else was going on 
(clearly something else did happen). Hopefully now we have a better 
sense of what kind of questions we can ask experts who do this kind of 
testing for a living; they can help us design and tune these tests (and 
others) to get us the kind of data that we want. Speaking of which...

Frances - since we now know what kind of information we couldn't capture 
(with the procedures as they stand), what kinds of information do you 
think we could (or did) capture at this kind of location? Once we know 
this, we can decide whether it's worth trying this again (if it's info 
that we want and warrants the effort we're expending).
> Its a great environment for introducing our program to folks who may 
> or may not have heard of us, but may not be the testing ground we were 
> hoping for.

My hope is that whatever we work out for this kind of setting won't be 
reliant on one person or another being there, but that we'll have 
instructions that a group of people (perhaps with a particular 
background) can set up and run themselves - that way other groups in 
other places can eventually do this too.

One arrangement that might work better (thinking off the top of my head 
here) is to keep the XO demo table as a free and open space with intro 
volunteers helping people play with the laptops, as they are now - and 
then have a separate table in the corner set off as a "testing lab," 
with 1-2 XOs and a volunteer that's been trained beforehand on some 
basic UI test cases (and ask researchers from a UI test lab to help us 
figure out some simple cases they can run).

Have a sign-up sheet on the "XO fun" table where people can sign up for, 
say, 15min test slots in "the lab," where they'll be guided through the 
process; they'll be dedicated to being in "test mode" since that's what 
they signed up for, and a single researcher that's trained on how to 
carry out this experiment beforehand can get a lot more focused data 
that we want in a planned, timed session than people passing by the 
table will be inclined to write down.

Thoughts?

-Mel