Crises
Human-Computer Evaluation Interactive System Project
The Crisis website usability evaluation aims to enhance the user experience by uncovering usability issues, improving the user journey, and optimizing site flow.
Designed with accessibility in mind, the evaluation focuses on simplifying navigation, clarifying content, and ensuring that users can easily find support and resources, ultimately creating a more seamless and supportive experience.
Project Timeline
Context
📋 Overview
The Crisis website usability evaluation was conducted using user-centered design principles, based on feedback gathered through participant testing and observations.
The target users include potential donors, volunteers, and campaigners who may face challenges with site navigation, accessing donation options, or finding information on volunteering opportunities. The evaluation aimed to streamline the user journey, ensuring easier access to critical features like donations and campaign involvement while addressing usability issues such as menu design and filtering options.
👩💻 Stakeholders
The primary stakeholders for the Crisis website usability evaluation include:
End Users: Individuals interested in supporting Crisis, including donors, volunteers, and campaign participants, who rely on the site to access information, make donations, and engage with the charity’s initiatives.
Crisis Charity Team: Responsible for maintaining and managing the website’s content, ensuring it effectively informs and engages users while promoting the charity’s mission.
Developers & Designers: Tasked with implementing technical changes and improving the website's usability based on evaluation feedback, ensuring a seamless and user-friendly experience.
Volunteers & Campaign Organizers: Critical to ensuring that the website’s volunteering and campaign features are easy to navigate, enabling supporters to get involved and contribute to the charity’s goals.
Problem
⚡️ The Challenge: How did you feel about finding and using the navigation menu
on the website?
⚡️ The Challenge: What was your experience like when trying to filter events or volunteering opportunities?
⚡️ The Challenge: Can you walk me through how you located different donation options on the site?
Methodology
The methodology for this evaluation incorporates both qualitative and quantitative approaches, using a combination of data collection methods to gather comprehensive insights into user behavior and website performance.
The testing started with the pre-test questioning used to understand the participant's background with charity and to initiate a conversation to allow them to feel comfortable and less like a test so the data would be natural and truthful.
Pre-test Question
TESTING CONTENT
Scenario - introducing a scenario, gives them a context of the goals. Showing the journey they take and which is more likely to develop content and conform to making easy-to-follow usability testing, is vital to ease the use in a natural way to simulate the charity website.
Think-aloud - the user was introduced to the scenario, and the participant was asked to apply the think-aloud method to find reasons underlying their behaviours, attitudes and experiences.
Verb-base & Scavenger hunt - these methods’ approach to the tasks enables the understanding of usability issues and the user behaviour and decisions toward the function.
TASKS
Task one - focuses on understanding how the homepage of the Crisis website is presented to the user and if they comprehend what can be done. The method used is a scavenger-hunt task which allows the user to show their journey in finding information
Task two - focused on the donation side of the Crisis site. The goal is to understand the user's journey, the types of donations they encounter and if they are successful in donating. The method used is a mixture of scavenger-hunting, allowing the user to discover information
Task three - uses a verb-based method to comprehend how the user tests the fundraising function; the aim is to participate in a fundraising event and see what user journey was created.
Task four - focused on findability, the user is tasked to find information regarding volunteering and the types of roles available.
POST-TESTING
Post-testing questions were asked to comprehend the evaluation performance of the tasks to understand the overall experience and their thoughts and to feel toward the website.
The questionnaire quantitatively measures their satisfaction with the Crisis website's usability. The advantages of using this questionnaire are the quick and easy structure whilst being reliable in usability.
DATA ANALYSIS
Involves a series of steps to ensure that data answers the evaluation goals of the Crisis Website.
FIRST STEP – get familiar with the raw data, rewatch the recording and compare it with notes taken while conducting the usability test
SECOND STEP – recordings are then transcribed on files and re-examined to add non-verbal behaviour to understand further the task's outcome, including pre-interview and post-task questions
THIRD STEP – transcript files were subjected to a coding method to highlight the usability issues and problems the user faced while executing the tasks.
FOURTH STEP – coded files are then written into a rich summaries document, structured in table format for readability purposes.
RICH SUMMARY
The coded files are then written into a rich summaries document, structured in table format for readability purposes. Allowing a further understanding of the data.
COLOUR MAP
RAINBOW SHEET
It displays the usability issues found. The table structure includes the number of usability issues, the page where it is found, the explanation, the participant that faced this issue and the severity level.
FINDINGS
SEVERITY SCALE
The scale is used to rate the findings. This type of scale was chosen to defined in terms of data loss rather than an impact on user performance or emotional state, which isn't a reliable constant source. {Dumas & Redish, 1999)
FINAL REPORT
The evaluation tasks concentrate on understanding the homepage information, the usability journey of the donation page & fundraising page, and the findability of volunteering & campaign. The results found usability issues in each task, which are analysed after methodology research and rigorous data analysis. The usability problems found are allocated categories in design cues, filtering, linking issues, information issues and others.
RECOMENDATION
Four recommendations were made focused on usability issues, suggesting the navigation design cues to be more robust, more filtering options, making sure elements are linked to the correct page and the information structure to be more straightforward.