Usability testing and design for higher education web sites

Editor's Notes

• #2: Introduce ourselves Roles in office, what office? Melissa: Structure of the office. What are our challenges? We serve a large number of people where detailed information is essential to convey to our constituents. Much of the information we share has specialized terminology, so we need to engage and educate them on both procedures and terminology. We rely heavily on our website to share that information.
• #4: Ask for questions. Where are people at with usability testing? Do they understand what it is? Are they doing it? What do they hope to get from the presentation? There are many forms and practices but at the heart of it is defining goals and testing for them using whatever prototype or model you have that you want to improve.
• #5: Hanna: my background in interaction design and doing usability testing as a regular part of art and design projects and then iterating based on the feedback received from users.
• #6: Melissa: Same for a year, nothing had been updated since a major web redesign by Central Digital Communications. Lack of direction, stagnant page. Hadn’t changed much or had a strategic plan. Never had there been a strategic plan (Melissa - in 4 years). Visuals were outdated. We didn’t know what students thought but we knew that staff weren’t entirely happy with it either. Terminology used on the home page was confusing to both students and staff (i.e. what does “world travel” actually mean here?). Too much text, hard to find anything from this page.
• #7: User testing helped us get from there to here within a couple of months with a clear sense of direction and clear partnership with users and our staff.
• #8: Here’s what our old model of design process looked like. The design team was always responding to short term fires that needed to be put out.
• #9: User testing allowed us to change the entire process. Instead of reacting to content and design requests, we are proactively pre-empting them for long term strategic planning, better partnership with the rest of the staff, and accountability. Flowchart aside, it means a more thoughtful process, more collaboration and design decisions and projects that are based on strategic goals, not putting out fires and doing short term fixes.
• #10: We’d like to tell you about our process.
• #11: At NYU OGS, we do a lean version of usability testing. We keep it at a low budget, go for minimal time commitment, and a process that works with the size of our office and staff abilities. Our motto is “It’s about making it better, not perfect” because perfect doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as a perfect solution and often, the quest for that goes directly against making any changes because the challenge seems too overwhelming. Another saying that you’ll hear designers and developers saying is that if you’re not embarrassed, you waited too long. People sit on projects for months and years because they don’t think it’s good enough and in the meantime, there are no improvements happening and technology and needs have changed.
• #15: A leaner budget is definitely possible if you don’t do lunch and only snacks and have smaller incentives.
• #16: Identifying goals
• #17: Tasks, what do we want people to do? Goals we want people to be able to accomplish on our site
• #18: Scenarios provide context and a way for users to enter into a situation to complete the task.
• #21: The setup - observation room where folks are observing and watching the screen.
• #23: Show a video demonstration of user testing. At the end of each user testing, I call the observation room and ask them if they have any questions that I can ask the user. Some common questions have to do with explaining why they didn’t click on a certain item.
• #24: Sometimes, it’s a lot of fun to hear how users react. At the end of this time, the observation room turns into a debrief session.
• #26: We focus on the most serious problems
• #27: and we determine doable fixes
• #32: Our timeline.
• #33: We’re coming up on 4 months. What’s been working? What’s next? What lessons have we learned? How has it impacted our office?
• #34: Let’s go back to the homepage. What problems did we identify? Visuals were outdated. Terminology used on the home page was confusing to both students and staff (i.e. what does “world travel” actually mean here?). Too much text, hard to find anything from this page.
• #35: Melissa: From usability testing we found that students had problems finding our advising hours, they never looked in the vaguely titled “looking for something” section and even if they did read the information there terms confused them and they couldn’t be bothered to read everything that was written in that section. No one wanted to read a paragraph on what our office was about so they didn’t and were hence confused as to what this site was about. We even found that students thought the main feature (the central grey box) on our earlier home page was broken, thus adding to the confusion.
• #36: User testing helped us get from there to here within a couple of months with a clear sense of direction and clear partnership with users and our staff.
• #37: Here’s what our old model of design process looked like. The design team was always responding to short term fires that needed to be put out.
• #38: User testing allowed us to change the entire process. Instead of reacting to content and design requests, we are proactively pre-empting them for long term strategic planning, better partnership with the rest of the staff, and accountability. Flowchart aside, it means a more thoughtful process, more collaboration and design decisions and projects that are based on strategic goals, not putting out fires and doing short term fixes.
• #39: Biggest lesson we’ve learned - The key to success in any usability testing is buy-in. We had to present a proposal first to the executive team who then announced it to staff, showed their support by coming, assured us of keeping staff accountable. We also presented it to staff.
• #40: Wrap up - why should you do this? List some reasons: You have a ready pool of users (students) You have immediate feedback and the satisfaction of knowing how your service is impacting students. It’s an incredible tool for working with a very large group of stakeholders and moving forward based on observations, not assumptions.
• #42: include twitter info