Project Overview
The American Heart Association (AHA) asked for a usability study on their Scientific Sessions Conference Newsroom website, an intranet site for journalists and other conference attendees. Some AHA employees identified issues with the site but didn’t know how to improve or reorganize the site. Other employees felt the site didn't need improvement, so the AHA team wanted empirical evidence to guide their decisions. As part of a team, I conducted a usability study using card sorts, heuristic evaluations, and think-aloud protocols. Our team then compiled our results into a SlideDoc report with findings and suggestions for improving the site.
Skills
Usability/UX
Card Sorting
User Testing
Design
Information Architecture
Tools
Morae Usability Software
Moqups
Slack
Microsoft Office
Interviews and Personas
To understand how users interact with the site, each team member conducted an interview with a member of the site's target audience (a healthcare or journalism professional). We used the interview data to create user personas to guide us as we designed our study. Scott Bobbington is one of the personas we created to make sure we catered our design recommendations to the user’s needs.
Card Sort
We made a list of each individual page on the AHA site and used these page names to conduct a card sort. All five members of our group conducted a card sort with one member of the site's target audience. We wrote all the page names down on notecards and then asked participants to sort the 56 pages of the site into categories that made sense to them (ie: About, Contact, etc.)
The above image shows a subset of the pages we asked the participants to sort.
Heuristic Evaluation
Users expect a website to follow certain conventions. If a website violates these conventions, usability may suffer. To evaluate the usability of the website, we each performed a heuristic evaluation. The heuristics we used were developed based on significant amounts of research, user testing, and design best practices. We gave each heuristic a severity rating ranging from (0) No problem, (1) Cosmetic Problem, (2) Moderate Problem, and (3) Major Problem. We then compiled our heuristics into one evaluation to determine the issues that were most severe for greatest number of reviewers.
Think-Aloud Protocol
We used the information we gathered in our heuristic evaluations, card sorts, and interview data to create common user scenarios for the site. We then asked users to go through the scenarios and perform the tasks they would need to do to complete their goals. Using Morae usability software, we recorded the user's screens while they went through the tasks and thought aloud about their experiences. We used the software to create markers on the videos for errors and notes. We then used the data from the usability test to inform our recommendations for improving the site.
Recommendations
Cover of the final usability report.
Major Takeaways
We found that users had a hard time navigating the site and made the following recommendations on how to improve the site:
Provide a clear organizational structure based on user's needs.
Use breadcrumbs to provide the user with feedback on their location within the site.
Provide a search function.
Reduce the size of the banner on the home page.
Main site elements linked to the main AHA site, and the user was frequently disoriented by this experience. We advised the AHA to make the two sites independent.
Use consistent formatting/design and effective indicators of hierarchy.
Suggested Sitemap
Informed by our usability tests and evaluations, I created a site map that improves the information architecture of the site. Users had a difficult time finding specific pieces of information because the site organization was not intuitive. My site map is structured to match user expectations about where to find information.
