Starting with the v3.0 release, we’d like to roll out usability testing for the upcoming releases of InvenioRDM.
Our goal is to gather feedback from as many testers as possible, and preferably from end-users (local repository managers, curators, researchers, research assistants, etc.). Testing with local instances will be especially helpful to help us gather real-world, local feedback, however if you don’t have an instance up and running, you could also participate by testing on InvenioRDM’s demo site.
Please reply to this thread if you or someone from your site is interested in joining the testing effort. We are in the early planning stages, so please feel free to share questions, insights, experience, and any logistical recommendations that you have!
I think I’ll ask our team to have some looks at InvenioRDM 3.0 when I managed to merge some of our content in. I don’t think it will be a complete usability testing (it’s mor about looking if the data is completely merged) but I guess we will gather some ideas about usability as well.
Hi Werner and Nnenanya, thanks for your interest in testing! The goal is for Invenio partners from multiple sites to test the next few releases soon after they come out. This would mean multiple testing rounds in early May, early June, early July. If we use a similar form for testing, in which we all test the same functions, we can gather our feedback quickly and provide it to the developers even as they work toward the next release. I’m eager to hear everyone’s thoughts and feedback on ways we might achieve this ambitious goal.
Hi @saragon02, do you plan to define a minimal set of features everyone should provide feedback on, or for the moment it is a more general activity where everyone perform tests on the aspects more relevant for the reference community?
Thanks for your question. I think we’d like to aim for having all testers test a minimal set of features so that we can report back consistently to the development team on any bugs we’re encountering. Part of our goals in this early discussion stage would be to decide on the elements to test and the specific information that we should collect.
We’re trying to install a couple of local instances for some projects we have, and we’d love to provide feedback on the usability of InvenioRDM. Due to the nature of the projects, we might not be able to direct the users to test some of the features directly, but we’d try to collect as much relevant information as we can and relay it back.
That’s great, I’m glad your users will be able to test some of the features! Thanks for your interest in this work. I will follow up soon with some preliminary logistical information for the testing process.
The long-term goal is to bake in usability testing as an integral part of the development and release process, so that everything that’s being shipped has been validated for UX issues. For that, it needs to happen on a regular basis, and we need to test it on a diverse set of users (roles, orgs, countries, domain, …), and I only see that happening if we can share the load between partners and so to say take turns.
Hi Sara,
we are also running an instance of InvenioRDM, which is planned as an institutional repository and successor to the current system. We don’t have that many research projects but many research items at the moment and are working on integrating/migrating it into the current version of invenio rdm. We are also scanning (not in detail) the new features and trying to evaluate the workflows for our researchers. We would like to share our experiences and ideas in using Invenio RDM from our side, but also from the researcher side. More detailed, of course, when we finally offer this service directly to our researchers. We also plan to set up an Invenio User Group (together with the University of Freiburg) where researchers with various problems, questions and suggestions around the use of Invenio RDM can discuss with us. This is a future work for us, but it might be of interest here. At the moment we are not running any systematic usability tests, but I will ask a team member to provide some ideas on it.
I’m glad to hear of your plans for establishing an Invenio user group and user testing! If you would like to try out our user testing in the meantime, you are very welcome to. It would be interesting to discuss systematic usability tests with your team in the future.
Thanks for your attendance at the Telecon today and your interest in InvenioRDM user testing. A preview of the Google form I would like to use for testing is here: Google_form_preview.pdf - Google Drive. Please feel free to send me comments/suggestions for improvements. I’d like to gather comments throughout this week with the goal of releasing the form and beginning the testing early next week. Thanks in advance for your help!
Thank you to everyone who had a chance to preview the usability testing form last week. We are now lanuching testing with our bug report-style form. The form can be found here: 2021 InvenioRDM Usability Testing Form
General guidelines:
Please test on your local instance of InvenioRDM, or, if your site does not have an instance running, please test at: https://inveniordm.web.cern.ch/
For testing, please use dummy/blank files and fictional names for Creators/Contributors as you see fit. If you would like to delete or suppress records created through local instances, please work with your local InvenioRDM administrators to do so. If you create test records at https://inveniordm.web.cern.ch/ and set them to Public, please be aware that they will be visible on the web!
If you create testing records using genuine scholarship or research outputs, please ensure that you have permission from the outputs’ owners and any co-authors on your own materials.