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Weebly is an online web-authoring tool designed primarily for the “average” Internet citizen to create an
online storefront, personal blog, or informational web. It offers free features for web hosting within their
domain (Weebly-based URL) or per-site premium charges for hosting your own domain name. This
online tool provides a content management system with some basic design elements set up into themes
for people to use without having to know HTML, a desktop web publishing language, or be a graphic
designer.
When logging onto the Weebly website, one is offered multiple theme templates to choose from, and
prompts the user to select the title of their Web and approve a web address (URL). Once a template is
chosen, the user is given the option to watch a video tutorial explaining the use of tools and features
offered. The layout is clean and organized, with tools labeled with text and pictures.
Weebly is designed to be user friendly. This means that a person with no web design background can log
on and create a website with ease. The target audience is very broad and consist of males or females with
a reading level around third grade. The intended age range of users is anywhere from eighteen and up, but
a younger individual would have no trouble with navigating Weebly. The ready-made and attractively
designed templates provide many easy-to-use functions. The tools aligned to the left of the screen,
provide a palette the user can simply drag and drop from to the “canvas” or Build area of the screen. A
user can add things such as images, video, maps, contact forms, and even simple navigation. These preformatted options make designing web pages easier, however, the “drag and drop” functions are not
obvious to a new user and learning via trial and error can be frustrating at first. Those who do not have
Web design experience seem to pick it up quickly and without much frustration, though we did find our
participants’ opinions of that varied somewhat.
Usability Test
When designing our usability test, we first decided on the practical objectives as suggested from the Basic
Elements of Usability Testing, “How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Tests.” (Rubin, 2008, p.25)
We wanted to test with a “live user” using a sample list of tasks for users to step through to create a basic
site in the Weebly tool. To make our testing fair, we controlled some of the conditions. We decided the
nature of the website would be a restaurant selling Aunt Bea’s Pies and provided our participants with a
menu of items, a location and several images so that we could have some control over what functions they
would need to use. It was decided that the user would pick a template and insert functions such as:
navigation, images, text, a map, and a contact form. Once the user created their website, we asked they
complete a survey to assess their perception of the tool’s usability.
Usability Testing Results
The survey was developed in Google Forms. Our collaborative environment of choice was Google Docs,
so the survey environment was an easy choice. We created a list of questions during our initial
synchronous team meeting, and then adapted the questions as we worked through the tasks we had
devised for the test subjects. The questions were a mixture of “Scale Questions,” “Yes or No” and “Add
comments and explanations.” Our goal was to provide a method to measure the user’s opinion of their
experience with the Weebly online environment, without help outside of the site. As each was given the
same instructions and we quietly observed them interacting with the tool, we could ascertain whether they
found it accommodating to their individual level of ability and enhanced their skill as they went or simply
frustrated them in regard to our view, but also survey them to capture their individual opinion of the tool
and process.
Observations
Each of us noted our observations during the exploratory testing:
Michael - I observed some frustration with the tool. The participant did not watch the video tutorial and
had never used the tool before. He struggled with figuring out functions were drag and drop and not click
and appear, and he struggled with finding where to change the names of pages for navigation.
Janice- I noticed that my user found navigation to be difficult. Weebly does not come with “next” buttons
so you have to navigate on your own. My user was not familiar with the site or any similar sites. He
found it hard to build his page. My user also found it difficult to add text. It took him a while to figure
out how to add a text box and place it anywhere on the page. My user was frustrated at times. My user
struggled with editing a page. He struggled with deleting unwanted pages. He did comment that the
“helpful” tips were in fact helpful.
Darin - My user attempted to use the Video Tutorial right away, but it was extremely slow to load and she
gave up. However, she was able to do the “click through trial and error” process pretty fast and figure out
how to complete the tasks assigned.
Conclusion
According to Rubin, a product’s usability can be assessed according to its “usefulness, efficiency,
effectiveness, learnability, satisfaction and accessibility. (Rubin, 2008, p. 5) Our team decided to use
exploratory testing with 3 participants in person with observation and surveyed results. According to our
survey, all of the participants would recommend Weebly.com as a web design tool. Not one of them
offered a comparative online tool as a recommendation. Although each had a different experience as can
be seen in responses to the scale questions, (Figure 1) when it came down to it, their bottom line was that
it was useful and effective. Two-thirds of the participants believed they could ultimately use the site and
accomplish the representative tasks if they returned as revealed in the number of Yes responses (Figure
2). From our observation of their attempts to complete the tasks, we were ability to assess the learnability,
since all were able to do so successfully. Overall, Weebly.com came out very well and it seems our team
and most of our participants would highly recommend it.
References
Rubin, J. (2008). Handbook of usability testing: How to plan, design, and conduct effective tests.
(2nd ed.), New York: Wiley.