Jayspace Fails Test

Hi, Darren,
We did a test of the Jayspace (online community/social networking) area of the website from 3 – 4 p.m. today, and the results were fairly disappointing. Rather than take you through it blow by excruciating blow, I’ll give you the summary of issues encountered:

• When three people or more tried to login at the same time, they all got the same kind of timeout error (image attached). It may be less people, even, as it’s hard to determine exactly when someone presses the enter to login. In any case, the site doesn’t seem to be able even a few people logging in at the same time. This was probably the most frustrating part of the experience, just not being able to get on at all. It took us at least 20 minutes, possibly longer, before everyone was logged in.
• In the Edit My Profile portion, Mary tried to change the picture that would show up when searching for her, but it wouldn’t take. This situation of the photo upload was repeated by others, who also had a hard time uploading pictures, only to find them not showing up or showing up as broken image sources in the View My Profile.
• The Edit My Profile also feels half-baked to our users, who had a hard time noticing the “update profile” link in between the text/html box and the photo upload.
• This page also doesn’t work in Safari, giving users no set of tools for the text/html box. Unless they know html, they can’t really do anything in that box.
• People also were confused by the “Find a Friend” module (which I’ve named “Make a Friend”), when it would return results of a people most like them with a link to their profile. They couldn’t understand why there was no way to contact that person (a hyperlinked e-mail, for instance). All I could say was that this was how the module was designed.
• The “Search User Profiles” (“Find a Friend” on Jayspace) was not intuitive at all for our users. With the green plus and red X, they didn’t know how to use it (despite my instructions).
  

My concern is that Mary’s concerned, obviously. But in a bigger way, if these users, who are mostly young(-ish), college educated, web-savvy folks, can’t figure it out when they are actually trying to as part of their job, how much less will a high school senior understand how to use this and, therefore, not use it. It is really troubling.

I think that covers it. Please let me know when these concerns can be addressed as we are still waiting to send our Jayspace card until this is really ready for the general public.
Yours,
Christian
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Christian Burk
Creighton University
Undergraduate Admissions
2500 California Plaza
Omaha, NE 68178
christianburk@creighton.edu
(402) 280-2703