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 In the fall semester of 2006 I worked with two other undergraduate Human-Computer Interaction students on the “Blogger Retrospective and Redesign Report” project for our HCI Methods class. Allison Gallant, Margaret Szeto and I started working together at the beginning of the semester to perform various ussability evaluation methods, all centered on a blog user working with Google’s Blogger system.

The Retrospective and Redesign project was the culmination of our semester of research and study of Human-Computer Interaction Methods. Our goal was to report the results and experience of our user studies, evaluate each of the methods we employed, and finally, synthesize a coherent redesign proposal for the Blogger system based on our user research.

After evaluating the whole of our research data, we decided on two major themes for our redesign proposal: adjusting the system to a more familiar paradigm, and enabling the formation of a strong online community. In adjusting Blogger’s posting to a document-oriented paradigm, we give users the power to work with a familiar concept – documents on a desktop – and we reduce confusion associated with blog post terminology. Secondly, our research consistently showed that users had a difficult time interacting with their blog audience, so we developed system changes that allowed for easier and more natural blogger-reader interaction.

>> View the final report.