¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 This past Thursday, Iuri organized a beta testing session with a number of literature scholars at Ryerson University in Toronto. We provided the five testers with an invitation letter, detailing the general instructions for testing, and a form to record their responses. Iuri also made himself available during the testing hours to answer any essential questions. (You can read more in Iuri’s own post on the subject.)

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Overall, the testers provided mixed but constructive feedback that we’ll use to orient ourselves as we approach the 17 May launch date. The two most common, and I think valid, criticisms of the current site were its lack of 1) clarity about its purpose and 2) frame for users as they navigate the uploading, encoding, and comparing processes. During this past Wednesday’s class, Lisa anticipated some of the arguments that comprised this first criticism. Our homepage could be much clearer, and I’m going to rethink and revise the tagline and deck to emphasize that we’re connecting close reading to TEI markup. I’d also like to revise and foreground a Get Started guide we added to the encoding page last week—it might be worthwhile to feature this on the homepage instead. To address the second criticism, lack of frame, from beta testing, we need to integrate some FAQ answers into prompts on the appropriate pages and recognize that first-time or beginner TEI users will need more guidance with tags. We might also want to reconsider the usefulness of the FAQ page itself. For example, I could envision integrating the answers to the FAQs into prompts, doing away with the page, and maybe including a “How It Works” infographic instead. On a more positive note, beta testers noted that the simplicity of the design aided the encoding experience and a majority suggested that they would use the site again.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Now that we have these initial responses, we’ll need to adjust some of our work over the next week to address the most pressing concerns and make some changes. After that, however, we’re already looking forward to the next round of beta testing.