Today we went to the SoG (Society of Genealogists) headquarters to review the site with a selected group of expert users - a mixture of professional genealogists, academics and historians. The idea was to let them loose on the site to test the improvements we’ve already made since the usability testing but more importantly to gain insight into what professional genealogists need from the site. We were particularly keen to get their feedback on the untested part - the transcripts and original pages from the census.

Normally, the trip to the SoG is a brisk 5 minute walk from the findmypast.com offices - today it was a rain-drenched dash as the heavens opened and London took the full brunt of a day of torrential rain.

Testing with the experts is a completely different experience from testing with general users - because they’re professional genealogists they’re less fussed over the details of how the homepage looks and if the registration is easy. Instead they focus relentlessly on the quality of the search, the search results and the accuracy of the records.

After briefing them on the background and the “known issues” with the website, we took them into the SoG’s excellent library and simply left them to it, making sure that there were plenty of us around to look over shoulders, take notes and answer questions.

A very productive day for everybody, I think. We got some tremendous insights into what the professionals will be looking for (and another long list of features and improvements to add) and the experts got to see the data for the first time. Rather excitingly, lots of them also found some unexpected new twists in their family trees, which is the real pleasure of family history. And they loved the colour images.

We’ve been working for the past week to make the most obvious fixes to the 1911 site before we let real users loose on it. Our usability agency provided us with a detailed report highlighting the main areas that could be improved so we’ve been trying to tick as many of those as possible in a rather short timeframe. But we’ve got a good few improvements ready for the testing.

Today was the first day of our “real user” usability testing at Westbourne Studios in West London. We are testing the site with 12 users over 2 days with around 45 minutes per test. We’ve selected the participants to get a wide ranges of ages, an equal mix of and men and women and also a range of “internet expertise” - from people that have been using the internet for years down to those who are just beginners.

We’re getting as many members of the team to watch the tests as possible - I went down with members of the Customer Support team from findmypast.com who understand better than most what the site needs to do: they spend all day talking to family historians. However, we have to remember that most people using the 1911census site will have very little knowledge of tracing their family trees, censuses or anything else to do with family history, and make sure the site works for them, rather than preaching too the converted.

The first day is eye-opening: of course the users react to the site in a completely different way to the 1911 team, but they give us some fascinating insights into how ordinary people are likely to use the site and what they expect to find where. The downside is that the testing is already beginning to create a very, very long list of things that we need to enhance or fix to make the site ready for general release.

The good news is that we’ve come away with a much better understanding of what users want to find and are bursting with ideas for improvements. Hopefully we will get just as many tomorrow.