Make Your Website Better

This week I conducted user testing for the University of Virginia’s Arts and Sciences web site. I’ve been working with the web team for nearly two years. When we began working together, we were looking at what changes were needed to make the site easier to use. The site had recently been overhauled by the prior web team, and stakeholders were having difficulty adapting to the new site design.

There were a multitude of issues, and the biggest challenge was in identifying the specifics, assigning priorities, and finding an easy way to reference all pages in the site. The site consists of approximately 1500 pages, although we were focused on the few hundred that addressed administrative topics related to procedures for signing up for classes, declaring a major, graduating, and College policies. We were not concerned with the sub-sites of the many departments.

The web team was aware of many issues, revealed through their own use of this site, through stakeholder questions and concerns, and through problem reports from users sent via a link on each page.

Designing the test tasks

We knew we wanted to conduct user testing, to watch undergraduate students use the site and observe their behavior. User testing is a critical component of site usability, the best way to know for certain whether the site’s navigation is intuitive and the content and design are clear and scannable. We had a good grasp on what we though were some of the biggest problems. The challenge was in designing tasks that would reveal how significant they were to the students who are the primary audience for the site.

I began structuring the test by examining site traffic logs. I wanted to know which pages were visited most frequently, so we could see what the usability issues were for those pages, and fix them. That would be one way to prioritize. I looked at statistics representing 12 months of site usage, and identified the top 20 pages. I constructed a set of tasks related to those pages and we tested 6 users.

Unanticipated results=big bonus

We learned some things that were completely unanticipated. For example, we discovered that a site-wide link to a section containing forms that students must use for a variety of actions wasn’t used. We discovered some navigation links that did not take students to information they expected to find. On a broader level, we observed the difference in web usage styles that is typical of all web users: some students preferred to use the search function to find information, while others preferred to browse by following links on the page.And we observed how difficult it was for all users to find a specific piece of information on a page with very long text that had not been formatted for scanning. They had found the right page, but could not find the specified item

The results of the user testing pointed to the most important issues that needed fixing and were the foundation of a to-do list. In addition, results were posted on a sub-section of the site, and faculty and administrative stakeholders were invited to review and make comments.

Other activities included a pop-up survey that appeared when users arrived at the home page for Arts & Sciences, consisting of a couple of questions designed to learn more about who visitors were, and their interests; and a brief survey, using SurveyMonkey, to refine the wording of the labels for some key navigation links.

The current round of user tests

Last week, we conducted user testing to discover whether students were easily able to navigate departmental web sites that use a particular design template. Some of the navigation labels for the local site were the same as labels for the global site, but in a different place on the page. One of the most interesting things we learned is that UVA students who were unfamiliar with the Arts & Sciences site did not even see the local navigation menu, located on the right side of the screen. Instead, they quickly scanned content links on the page. It wasn’t until they had difficulty with those links that they looked more carefully at the page and discovered the local links. This bears out the observation that people scan web pages, and that they will adapt to your navigation scheme if they have to.

User testing is right up there at the top of the list for important activities when you’re contemplating changes in your site structure, navigation, content and design. In addition to getting answers to the concerns you are testing for, you will come away with unanticipated insights into how your users behave and what you need to do to accommodate them.

Oh, and the best thing about last week’s user testing is that one student, completely un-prompted by us, asked whether we had recently made changes to the site, because she found it far easier to use.

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