User Research: Interviews to evaluate improvements on the shortcut module

Problem/Motivation

Conduct semi-structured interviews to several Drupal users with different professional roles to gather feedback about the improvements done through the project.
A control test strategy will be used to understand whether the changes proposed are valid and what improvements could be made.

Goals

• Validate the changes on the shortcuts module to introduce per-user and per-role modes.
• Understand the patterns on how the users behave when interacting with the shortcuts module before and after the changes.
• Find improvements that could be implemented for future research/development

Results

The thematic analysis of the 5 interviews performed show the following outcome (excerpt from the project that will be published later on):

• Participants expected the star icon to add a private bookmark and not a global one. They understood what a global shortcut is but they didn't expect the current workflow.
• Participants didn't expect to have shortcuts available when they created a new shortcut set although they understood the utility of the feature. They would rather have an explicit clone, copy or duplicate action.
• Shortcuts per role is a popular feature as shown in the survey comments.
• Participants expected to be able to edit and reorder their shortcuts.
• Some participants expect to somehow edit the shortcuts that are provided for them (per role, sitewide, etc) in some sort of merge fashion. Meaning that they get a list of shortcuts and then they can privately reorder them, rename them, hide some, etc.
• Participants got confused with the current user experience, specially those who weren't regular users of the shortcut module. A few elements were highlighted by several people, when adding a shortcut set, the page shown (listing the copied shortcuts) wasn't expected, the toolbar interaction was a bit confusing, and the redirection to homepage when adding a shortcut were some of the issues remarked.