Hello! In this blog post I would like to tell you about the user testing results! The user testing process went great, and the data we got from it has given way to some interesting changes to the Lore System! Furthermore, our fantastic “Conjurer of Fancy Doodles” has conjured up a brand new front page for us, that we think is a lot more interesting than the old one!
The User Testing Results
As mentioned in our last blog post, we set out to test the Lore System functionality. First of all I would like to thank those of you who participated in the tests with us. Your insights were invaluable, and most of you will see some of your comments directly reflected in future changes!
Now what did we actually find during the testing? Well let’s go through it, feature by feature.
The World Sections
We got some feedback on our initial ideas for the predefined World Sections, which were “World Main”, “Story”, “Characters”, “Locations”, and “Notebook”. There were tons of ideas for more in-depth section titles, but the generalness of the current sections seemed to make sense to most.
It was important for us to test the functionality of users defining their own sections. Our tests showed that there was a small thing here that made sense to us, but did not make sense to the users.
Defining sections, here is used as factions more than general world buildings, a use case we saw during testing. 
After confirming sections the user was sent back to this view.
When confirming the defined sections, the user was sent back into the main world creation view. This caused some confusion because they thought the world would be created directly. The reason we sent the user back was because they could select the document structure before naming the world. They could however not press the “Create World” button, as we did not want the possibility of unnamed worlds. We will be changing up this dialogue to alleviate this confusion.
Besides this, our design for creating a new world was intuitive to the users!
The Navigation
All of our users found the drag and drop of the navigation to be easy and intuitive to use. A problem we found however, was that the sections were seemingly immovable at this point. Another issue was that the “Edit Section” button was confused for a button to edit the individual documents. To fix these issues, we plan to implement a dialogue specifically for editing the sections and the world information!
Here is the new view for editing sections. It has been combined with editing the world information.
Furthermore, the navigation presented one of the most persistent problems throughout the testing. When asked to edit the information of a Lore Page, the first instinct of all the users, was to right-click the relevant document in the menu structure. Because of this, we will be building a contextual right-click menu into the Lore System. This means that in the system, you can right-click on documents, sections, or anything else, to open up a menu specific to the clicked object. This will hopefully make it much more intuitive to edit documents in LoreMaster.io!
In the top left corner of this picture shows a mockup of the right click menu which appears when clicking while over a section icon.
The Lore Page
For the Lore Page, and the general document structure, the biggest issue was editing the name after creation. As mentioned further above, the primary way we will fix this is by adding the right-click menu. We will also be adding other small ways to edit the documents. These will ease the process of customizing documents.
The Menu Folders
Furthermore, we found that confusion occured around the so called Menu Folders. Our plan for the Menu Folders were that they would be points in the navigation that did not need to be explained. For example the user could make a Menu Folder called “Royals”. For easier finding, the documents for the royals of the your created world could be dragged and dropped underneath this Menu Folder. “Royals” itself however did not need any inputted information. At any time, the Menu Folder can be converted into a Lore Page. Since you can drag and drop Lore Pages to be ordered under one another, some testers raised questions as to why it was there. The main problems with it where however when we asked the testers to created or edit a Menu Folder.
The Lore System treated the Menu Folder as a type of document. This created a lot of confusion during the test. Both editing and creating it necessitated the user to press “Edit Document” and “Create Document” respectfully. To alleviate this we will be redoing the document creation, as currently there is no other document types than Menu Folders and Lore Pages. We will also be adding a seperate feature for the Menu Folder creation. How this new creation will look is not yet clear. Be sure however, that we will strive to make it as intuitive as possible!
The Content Blocks
During the testing, the Image Content Block was not yet ready and functional. To still get an idea of how to properly implement images, we asked the testers how they thought it would work, and more importantly, how they would want it to work. The main functionality will be the ability to upload images, and to embed images from a URL. Besides that, no design flaws were pointed out to us by the testers. Multiple testers praised the Rich Text Editor and the customizability of the tables, which is great since customisability is a core feature of loremaster.io.
That is the end of the primary user testing results. I won’t go into details with all the little bugs and issues we found, but the important changes have been outlined here. Overall the results were very positive, and we are very happy with the how it went!
Our New Frontpage
About a month and a half ago we made our second blog post ever talking about our pretty new website. Yet here we are, redesigning it again. There are two reasons we have redesigned the LoreMaster.io frontpage. The first reason is that as some of you readers might know, LoreMaster.io was started as part of a university project. Our partners right now therefore include a professor of Interactive Digital Media, and a business developer. They were the ones that told us our original website, while pretty, was actually quite boring. We ended up agreeing with them, so we thought about how we could portray LoreMaster.io in a more interesting way on the website. That’s when our “Conjurer of Fancy Doodles” came up with a plan.
We could combine the frontpage with how we want the Story Canvas of LoreMaster.io to work! See the second reason we wanted to change the frontpage was because we were moving on to the Story Canvas development cycle. Combining the Story Canvas and the frontpage created something that was not only incredible to look at, but also showed the functionality of the Story Canvas.
If you go to the front page and click on the map points at the top of the page, you can read small blurbs about the realm of Loremasterio. It is a fun little way to combine our passion for worldbuilding, with the features of LoreMaster.io!
We have taken the designs based around the Story Canvas and we have also changed up the banners on our Facebook and Twitter profiles. Go check them out!
So what is next?
Well as I mentioned we’re implementing the changes from the user testing results. But we are also working hard on the Story Canvas. We are still in the early stages, but it is looking promising. I promise we will show you more, when we have more to show!
Until then, all the best!
The LoreMaster.io Team
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