CEDER Website Usability Evaluation & Redesign
Problem
The website for the Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER) at University of Michigan was hard to use and provided a clunky experience for potential and current clients of the organization. We were asked to to conduct a full usability evaluation and needs assessment for the site to suggest redesigns to make the experience better for the users.
Solution
Our team provided CEDER with an extensive group of reports detailing the processes and results of our user research, a set of recommendations to implement to the site, and a mock-up prototype of several pages in the site.
Impact
Our design research offered CEDER much needed feedback on their site and specific, executable recommendations backed by thoroughly followed practices and methodologies conducted with their target users. Once implemented, these designs will allow CEDER to better serve their target users, leading to better relationships that allow them to focus on the real work of designing, evaluating, and researching educational programs.
For a more detailed breakdown of the project, processes, and pictures of the prototypes, see below.
Project Brief
The University of Michigan - Ann Arbor (U-M) based Center for Education Design, Evaluation, and Research (CEDER) was seeking a team to evaluate their website for its usability and if it was fulfilling the needs of the users of the site. They felt that the experience of their site could be improved in terms of communication with potential clients and partners, as well as more clearly communicating the services, expertise, and resources they offer.
CEDER's homepage
Site Analysis and Problem Exploration Interviews
We conducted an interaction map for the site in which we graphically laid out all of the pages and the buttons that take the user to each one, connected with lines.
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After the interaction map, we conducted interviews with the target users of the site, professors, teachers, non-profit members conducting education, and people conducting research. We also interviewed members of CEDER itself, as they are users of the site on the opposite side of clients. We conducted six interviews, for some of which I took notes and some of which I asked the questions. Our goals for these exploratory interviews were to understand what the motivations for users are to work with CEDER, how are the users connecting and communicating with the CEDER employees, and what were the users taking away from the site in terms of how they understood what services CEDER provided.
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We did a full data synthesis after our interviews using the affinity wall method and created a set of personas representing the target users.
My teammate and I grouping notable insights generated by looking at the transcripts of our interviews. We grouped insights into categories that had to do with particular functions of the site, pain points of the users, needs of communications, and others.
These are the three personas we created do guide our thinking in the next phase of our design. They were created after synthesis of the data to represent potential users of the site.
Comparative Evaluation
The next step in our process was to look into the "competitors" of CEDER. These included other university organizations mainly, some consulting firms, and some non-profits. We systematically evaluated each competitor individually according to criteria we defined (like competition level, general assessment, clarity of communication, past work, ecc.) and then narrowed down our list and generated a list of findings and recommendations for CEDER's website.
Surveys
We crafted and sent out a survey to help us answer the following questions related to CEDER's site and services:
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What are the factors that contribute to people choosing to collaborate with CEDER?
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What types of information are people looking for when viewing CEDER's previous projects?
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How do people prefer to get in contact with CEDER?
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The survey was distributed to professors within the School of Education (SOE) at U-M and external existing clients of CEDER's.
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We analyzed the resulting data from the surveys and delivered a report of them to CEDER.
Two of the graphs we generated outlining the users' preference for seeing the impact of a project and its methodology over other information (left) and the users preference for detailed text and images describing the projects (right)
Heuristic Evaluation, Prototyping, Kano Test, and Usability Test
We applied Nielsen's Usability Heuristics to another in depth analysis of the existing CEDER page to determine how it was performing in its use of the heuristics, this analysis gave us more insights into how to better the usability of the site to recommend in our report and put into practice in our prototype.
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We prototyped a couple key pages for the website (home page, services page, and contact page) and asked participants to carry out specific tasks while observing them. In between the tasks, we asked the participants a series of Kano questions. Kano methodology is used to gauge priority for users of specific features to be implemented, giving us a clearer idea of what design elements were most important or attractive to our participants almost in real time.
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Once all of these methods were carried out to their full extent we delivered the clients all of the reports and recommendations we had generated with clear instructions on how to implement our designs and the data backing them up.