During my time as the Webmaster for Radio K, the website was rebuilt and redesigned. I was responsible for managing content, layouts, and page designs on both websites during the transition. As part of this process, I led a volunteer group in a quality assurance study to test the new website's performance and stability.

As the main manager and developer for both versions of the website, it was crucial to maintain sync between them during the transition. This meant updating both sites simultaneously as new content was produced and needed posting. Once the new website reached a certain level of stability, I was able to open up my previously individual task of troubleshooting to a group of student volunteers. I was able to assign specific to each of the volunteers, to allow for a broad scope of different browsers to test the website in.

Mobile

iOS - Safari, Firefox, and Chrome

Android - Chrome and Firefox

Tablet

iOS - Safari, Firefox, and Chrome

Android - Chrome and Firefox

Desktop

MacOS - Safari, Firefox, and Chrome

Windows - Firefox and Chrome

Volunteers were assigned a device category, operating system, and set of browsers to repeat the study directions in. They collected their results into three categories: errors, visual issues, and miscellaneous observations. The study directions were focused on a specifc set of pages, testing interactions with the page elements and observing how they behave under different browser configurations and changes.

I focused the study on a specific set of pages and subpages that had sufficient content. The volunteers were asked to navigate, interact with, resize, and generally abuse each site page. Listed here are some of the categories and associted tasks that were given in the study directions:

While doing so they were instructed to look for site errors and bugs, visual elements and resizing issues, and general performance. They collected their data into a template which they submitted back to me, and I aggregated the data and notes into a primary spreadsheet. Once I had collected and combined all the volunteer responses, I led a workshop on data synthesis and study result interpretation. During this workshop, student volunteers learned about data collection and sorting, response categorization, and assigning levels of severity. Once all this had been done I had a list of issues to fix, content to update, page layouts to change, and visual elements to adjust.

At the end of the study I had a list of tasks sorted into category and assignment, subsorted into topic and severity. During the synthesis workshop volunteers were able to expand on their notes and offer suggestions, observations, and critiques of the website content and design. Shown here are some of the sorted responses from the volunteers, separated into category:

Errors and Bugs

Visual Issues

Other Performace Issues

Volunteers used a template for their responses in order to maintain study integrity across testers, and to help keep them on course during their testing tasks.

As the chief bug fixer for the website, having this data meant I could get started on implementing the updates to ensure quality. I corrected content errors, rewrote pages, edited code, and updated layouts to address the things that the volunteers were able to find.

This process ensured website quality, tested performance under different browser conditions, and allowed for community feedback on layouts. In the end, we were able to complete some necessary backend architecture and launch the new website after these final touches were implemented.