Evidence

At last, I've got some evidence that a design change had an actual impact on the usage of my software! This is quite an exciting development. The proof*:












At the end of last year, I changed the way the rating system worked on the student shared resources - rather than a small "RATE" link, which opened up a rating tool, and wasn't very obvious or intuitive, I replaced it with nice big thumbs up/thumbs down rating tool - described here. It turns out, as shown in the graph above, that it has encouraged students to use it. In the 17 months that the first iteration was live, 53 ratings were added. In the last three months, there have been 52 ratings. Given the small numbers, the error bars are going to be large, but this has to be a statistically significant result.


* For probably barely statistically significant values of "proof"