Festival2012/Submit/OpenBadges Backpack UserTesting

• Title of session: Open Badges Backpack User Testing
• Your name and affiliation: Sunny Lee, Open Badges Project Lead, Mike Larsson, Open Badges UX Implementation Development Lead, Emily Goligoski, Open Badges Community Manager
• Session format: Learning Lab

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

The Open Badges team is rolling out user experience enhancements to the backpack. In addition to providing some contextual information about Open Badges, this session will walk the user through the badges journey from;

• learning about Open Badges basics
• going to a site that issues Open Badge Infrastructure compatible badges
• earning badges
• setting up a backpack account
• pushing those badges to your backpack
• exploring the features available in the backpack

In the process, the user will have gained first hand exposure to the different parts comprising the Open Badge Infastructure. By providing feedback of their experience, participants will be contributing directly to the features conversation, helping to inform prioritization of next steps.

How do you see that working?

1. The session will kick off with a brief intruction on badges in order to provide context to the Open Badges work and the pieces involved.
2. Then we'll provide a list of online spaces in which one can go to earn their first badge; openbadges.org site, codeschool, P2PU, webmaker, etc.
3. User will go ahead and earn one or more badges.
4. We will prompt the user to go ahead and send their earned badge to their backpack
5. The user will have to set up their backpack for the first time as well as a Persona account if they don't have one already
6. After establishing all the necessary set up processes, the user will have pushed their badge into the backpack
7. We will provide guiding questions to help the user explore the backpack and the new user experience enhancements in order to document the interaction and the feedback for later use.
8. Open Discussion: We will discuss openly about the experience; what worked well, what didn't, where can they go to log bugs moving forward etc.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

Two, one-hour sessions with ~15 participants. We can add more sessions depending on demand. With 5, 15 participants, the format will largely remain the same. With 50, we may have to switch things up and group participants into pods.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

Our goal is to make the session very easily replicable. After the first session, I'm fairly certain participants will at the minimum be able to provide assistance at a followup session.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

The benefits to session participants are as follows:

• They learn about Open Badges and the landscape of Open Badges
• They get to learn about user testing
• They get to be actively involved in the feature development conversation

The outcomes we hope to see are as follows:

• We hope that we've extended our network of Open Badges community members.
• We hope we inspire participants to continue to talk about Open Badges to their respective local communities
• We hope participants continue to stay engaged and provide us with feedback on their experience with the UI improvements, log bugs, and sign on to future user testing opportunities.