This series looks at the different site interactions that readers have with informational sites and is adapted from the full paper on the topic that I wrote with Jan Spyridakis and presented at HCII 2015: Using Readers’ and Organizations’ Goals to Guide Assessment of Success in Information Websites. See the entire series
Reading to Do a Task Outside the Website Later
When reading to do a task outside the website, readers’ accomplish their goals outside of the web and after they’ve read the content that provides the prerequisite learning for the task. Some examples of such interactions include:
- The United States Internal Revenue Service’s instructions on filling out the Form 1040[1].
- The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA)’s information about performing crosswind landings [2].
- An article about how to do well in a job interview [3].
The figure shows the relationship between the readers’ interaction with the content and the task they hope to accomplish.
When authoring content for this type of interaction, the web usability goals include search-engine optimization. Term and vocabulary alignment is an important and easy way to make the content easy for the reader to discover.
Of course, providing meaningful, interesting, and helpful content is critical. In this type of interaction, understanding the nature and relationship of the content and the task are key elements towards getting meaningful feedback on how well your content is doing in those categories. Because this type of interaction consists of two, temporally-separate events–reading/leaning and doing–it might be more effective to assess them separately. For example, you could include affordances in the content that test the intermediate goal of learning the content before the task is attempted and to consider using methods to collect and coordinate information about task completion.
Consider the case of a driver’s license test-preparation site. The site could include a quiz for the reader (and the site manager and stakeholders) to determine the readers’ learning and the content’s effectiveness in the short term. Perhaps also providing feedback to the reader on areas that require additional study. The task, passing the written driver’s license test in this example, would occur later and be measured at the Department of Licensing. The two experiences could be related somehow to evaluate the effectiveness of the test preparation site and the actual task of passing the license exam.
In this example, asking the reader about satisfaction could also be done during and after readers’ interaction with the content to understand how they feel about that, as long as the questions did not interfere with the learning task.
[1] http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf
[2] http://flighttraining.aopa.org/students/solo/skills/crosswind.html
[3] http://mashable.com/2013/01/19/guide-to-job-interview/