Website Usability 2019

USABILITY TESTING REPORT

OFFICE OF ENGAGEMENT WEBSITE
Hudson Huth — 2019

Background
The Office of Engagement is currently developing a new website. This new website had a soft launch in
November of 2018 and will have a full launch early in the year, 2019. In order to find and address problems
with the site, moderated usability testing was performed. This testing asked user to perform a number of
tasks on the site, giving way to unique insight into the sites flaws. This report will address the tests
performed, summarize the results of those tests, and provide recommendations to improve the site.

Methodology
Test Time: 10-15 minutes

Test Personnel: 1, one person to give participants their tasks and take notes (sessions will be recorded to take
record notes later)

Required Materials: Laptop; access to site in development; screen recording software; audio recorder;
notepad

Tasks
This test will ask users to complete a task on the website. There are three tasks they will accomplish:

1. Scenario: Imagine that you are an engineering professor at Purdue. Your department is pushing for
more service-oriented classes. In your free time you volunteer at the local food pantry, and you want
to design a course that will work in partnership with the food pantry. However, you want to see an
example of a service-learning course before you move forward with the idea.

Task: Find a course syllabus template to help you design your course.

Destination: Learning and Scholarship -> Service Learning -> Faculty & Staff -> Teach

2. Scenario: Imagine that you are a graduate student at Purdue. You are unsure of what classes to
choose for the coming year, but you definitely want to work with professors who have work on
community projects. If you find a professor who has won an engagement award you will try to take
their class or do research with them.

Task: Find information about Purdue professors who have won engagement awards.

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Destination: Engagement at Purdue -> Annual Engagement Awards

3. Scenario: Imagine that you are on the board of a non-profit small business advocacy organization.
While you hear about the problems that small businesses face, you want to do some primary
research to see what might be causing these problems. Unfortunately, your organization does not
have the staff, time, or ability to complete this kind of research.

Task: Find who to contact in order to partner with a Purdue faculty member to do research.

Destination: Learning and Scholarship -> Service Learning -> Community

For each task, start from the homepage of the site. Before you begin, start the screen recorder as well as the
audio recorder. Both of these will be referenced later while building the usability testing report. Give over
controls of the computer to the participant and read off the first task. Encourage participants to speak about
their decisions as much as possible. Participants can use any navigation method to get to the destination.
After they have completed the task (or give up), return to the homepage and begin the next task. When the
participant has completed all three, ask them what difficulties they had and their overall opinion on the site.
Hopefully the participant will offer insight on additional changes to make to the site.

Test Results
Time to Complete Each Task
Task 1 Task 2 Task 3
Participant 1 3:05 DNC 0:35 1:00

Participant 2 3:45 DNC 0:20 0:35

Participant 3 2:50 DNC 0:20 --

Participant 4 1:40 0:40 0:20

Participant 5 2:15 0:50 0:30

Average 2:43 0:33 0:36

Red signifies that the participant was unable to complete the task. Orange signifies that the user completed
the task, but did not find the optimal solution. For task 2, both of the users decided to go to the Engagement
Faculty page and contact one of the faculty members instead of utilizing the contact page or the service-
learning resources page, which was my intended destination.

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Participant Notes
 All of the participants were familiar with Purdue websites, and recognized the website template as
being part of the Purdue brand.
 Many participants expressed frustration with not understanding the headings. They stated that
“engagement” was used too frequently, the headings sounded too similar, or they did not
understand what the headings meant.
 One participant made the complaint of a lack of search option. While there is a search in the upper
corner, this participant did not notice it. In addition, this search feature does not always direct users
to the proper information.
 Sometimes, participants would find themselves on the proper page, but they would not scroll to find
the information to complete the task. Subsequently, these participants would navigate off the page
thinking they had not reached the proper destination.

Findings and Recommendations

In general, participants were able to accomplish their tasks quickly and without error. This shows that the site
is intuitive to use and organized in a logical way. The second and third tasks were accomplished by all users
who attempted them. Users ran into no bugs or other issues with the site, and they were able to quickly
navigate between pages with no errors. There are, however, two primary recommendations that this report
makes.

Learning and Scholarship: Navigation

The first, and most glaring, finding was the low completion rate on the first task. For this task participants
were asked to find a course syllabus template. To do so requires a minimum of four page navigations from
the homepage, and the pdf link is located several scrolls down the page. In addition, participants noted that
the headings in this section are ambiguous (Teach, Resources) or unfamiliar (Scholarship of Engagement,
Service-Learning). For more specialized users, these sections may not be difficult to understand; however,
testing has shown that some users find these sections difficult navigate.

Recommendations
As a solution, I suggest a restructuring of the Learning and Scholarship page hierarchy to reduce the navigable
clicks from four to three. To do so, we would need to remove an index page from either Learning and
Scholarship or the Service-Learning and Scholarship of Engagement Pages. Reducing the number of pages
users have to navigate through should increase the success rate that users accomplish their site tasks.

Alternatively, users who did not use the top bar, but instead the navigation section in the bottom of the
home page, were more successful in completing the first task. By moving this categorized navigation section
above the boxed navigation, users may utilize it more, improving their success rate on the site.

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Site Contact Page

The second finding regards the site’s contact page. The Engage with Us tab houses both a user-group-
oriented FAQ section as well as the Contact Us page. The second task should have directed participants to
this section, however some of them chose not to navigate there but instead to the Engagement Council.
Many participants noted the ambiguity of the headings and the overuse of “engagement” on the site. I
believe this section, Engage with Us, may suffer from that same ambiguity.

Recommendations
I suggest reversing the order of these pages, Engage with Us and Contact Us, so that Contact Us appears on
the top navigation bar. Users are more familiar with a Contact Us page and will utilize it more frequently,
rather than contacting members of the Engagement Council. Additionally, it may be useful to reconsider the
title, Engage with Us, so to reduce the number of times “engagement” is used on the site and to decrease
ambiguity over the purpose of the page.

Conclusion
This concludes the Office of Engagement website usability report. The findings and recommendations in this
report are based off moderated usability testing, the full content of which can be found at
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mI9OzVJgbEC-eGGi2lRWtuRzUaRG8aMP. Thank you for reading this
report, and I hope you take some of these findings into consideration.

Note: This testing was performed before the final version of the website was launched. However, the
recommendations presented here are still relevant to the current state of the website.