THE GRAHAM INSTITUTE OF SUSTAINABILITY
Utilizing user experience research to improve the design of a sustainability organization's website
Overview
Graham Sustainability Institute at the University of Michigan mobilizes the expertise and passion of scholars, partners, and decision-makers to bring world-class research to real-world sustainability challenges. They continually seek guidance from a wide range of stakeholders spanning the business, academic, non-profit, and government sectors. They approached our team to evaluate the usability of their new website.
Duration:
3 months
My Role:
User Experience Researcher
Problem Space
Graham Sustainability Institute wants to ensure that their new website is easy to use, intuitive, and resourceful to its key users. In order to do so, the website needed to be evaluated and tested by User Experience Researchers.
Interaction Mapping
Interviews
Research Methods
Comparative Analysis
Surveys
Heuristic Evaluation
Usability Testing
Empathize
My initial goal was to get acquainted with the user experience of the novel website and the needs of our users. To do so, I began by creating an interaction map, carrying out user interviews, and creating a user persona using the qualitative data gathered from interviews.
Interaction Mapping
Creating an interaction map allowed me to explore the entire website and visualize potential customer journeys within the site. It also helped me to begin brainstorm potential pain points and areas of improvement on the site.
User Interviews
Next, I conducted 6 interviews with each user group that makes up the primary users of the graham institute's website:
Students
Faculty of the University of Michigan
External Partners
Staff of Graham.
After completing the interviews, I analyzed the findings by way of data coding.
Exploration
After completing the discovery work, I wanted to start searching for ideas on how to enhance Graham’s website as it relates to User Experience.
Competitive Analysis
After gathering insights from users of the website through interviews, I wanted to analyze websites that address similar audiences and provide similar services to their users. Looking at what works and what doesn't work on other websites helped me to uncover gaps and identify what's done well/poorly by other organizations. There was a particular set of criteria that I paid attention to on each website when conducting the analysis.
Those criteria were:
Information Architecture
Difference in Offers Provided
Project Variety
Visual Storytelling
Research Grants and Donations
Surveys
Since the majority of the research methods that we used previously were qualitative, I wanted a way to gather quantitative data so that we could obtain more statistical and objective information from the users of Graham. Therefore, I decided to use the platform Qualtrics to create a survey that could be administered to users.
My team and I sent out over 400 surveys and received 60 responses from faculty, students, and staff.
Survey Findings
Testing
I wanted to gain an understanding of user mental models, and how they interacted with the website in real-time with the website. Therefore, I decided to use a few methods to assist with understanding the usability of the website.
Heuristics Evaluation
Utilizing Nielsen’s list of heuristics (Nielsen, 1994), in conjunction with my own proposed criteria, I analyzed the usability of the Graham Institute's website.
Performing a heuristic evaluation allowed me to analyze the site's usability without having to recruit actual users to test. This helped me identify areas that users found frustrating or where design could be improved to elicit more optimal results.
I organized the severity of the usability issues on each page of the website using this following severity scale:
Usability Testing
The last research method that we employed was Usability Testing. My team and I wanted to uncover any potential frustrations or uncertainties that may appear during a user's interactions with the website. Therefore, we created a set of tasks that would allow us to observe the level of difficulty users may have when using the site.
Participant Recruitment:
We recruited six participants. We coordinated with our client and provided incentives to help increase the number of participants we had.
Testing Environment:
I conducted the test in a private room where there would be the participant, the moderator, and the annotators.
Protocol and Pilot Testing:
Prior to conducting the actual usability test, I developed a protocol that contained a moderator script, consent forms, our team’s goals as researchers, as well as the tasks that I wanted participants to complete. After creating the protocol, I ran a few pilot tests with users to ensure the tasks were straightforward.
Findings & Recommendations
-
Finding 1
From interviews and Competitive Analysis, our research indicated that the role of Graham is not amplified in the project case studies with their partner organizations.
-
Finding 2
From interviews and surveys, we found that getting involved with Graham’s programs is a major reason for engagement by students due to their interest in sustainability.
-
Finding 3
Majority of the users looking to interact with the website are interested in the various programs and courses offered by the institute. They reported difficulty in locating these courses and the faculty members
-
Finding 4
From our Heuristics Evaluation and Usability Testing, we noticed that inconsistencies were found with respect to the help and support feature provided by the institute.
-
Recommend
The 'About' page on Graham's website could display testimonials of the partners. This would help the users, especially the potential partners to know the success stories with other reputable organizations/people.
-
Recommend
Enhanced engagement opportunities or events for students enabling them to network and learn more about Graham, similar to events held by other U of M institutes.
-
Recommend
Tunneled navigation path to partnering websites within the University could be implemented to help users in locating detailed information.
-
Recommend
Include a prominent contact us or support us call to action button to guide users when they require assistance.
Reflection
This experience truly enhanced my knowledge regarding user experience research and how to implement certain methods to attain specific results. The only areas of improvement that could have made the results of our research more definite is if we had more users to collect data from, and had more opportunities to receive feedback from our clients. Since this experience only lasted 4 months, time limitations made it difficult to have a significant amount of users for each study.