We've been grabbing unsuspecting friends and colleagues, sitting them down with the page on the screen or printed, and asking which links they would click to accomplish different tasks—searching the Library catalog, looking up the dates for finals. The face-to-face user testing has been enormously useful in uncovering design flaws. It always is. And we already tweaked a number of things in the design in response to what we learned, like adding a Home tab and changing the language on some of the links. But we want to reach beyond our immediate circle and get feedback from a wide range of users, so we decided to try user testing via a survey.

The survey lists the same tasks that we were using for our face-to-face testing and asks people to indicate which link they would use to accomplish each task. We hope the survey results will reveal which links are solid and which are a little fuzzy around the edges. We also expect to get more general feedback on the wireframe. We'll probably also hear from some respondents about the current design.

We'll report back on how well a survey works for this sort of information architecture road-test.