Intro

During Spring 2018, Measuring Communities sponsored a project for our Experience Studio at Purdue University. We worked with our sponsor Kathy and Richard through the whole semester. Measuring Communities is a data base website provides service and resources to veteran families and some of the veteran helping organizations. The website itself had a lot of contents, heavy and difficult to use. Our goal is to provide design recommendations so they can fix their website.

My roles: first and secondary research, usability testing, ideation, prototyping

Analysis

Since Measuring Communities was a pre-existing product, we started our primary research by conducting heuristic analysis. The purpose of conducting a heuristic evaluation provides many benefits to our team at this stage. First, it allows the team to better understand the content and context of the website we will be working with for the rest of the semester. We can take a relatively quick and effective sweep of the website to identify usability errors based on our chosen heuristics, and rate them on a severity scale. By identifying these usability errors early, we can test them with users, validate them, and focus on the various tiers of usability issues.

We used Jakob Nielsen's 10 heuristics. Each team member got assigned a couple of heuristics and analysis the violation.
Our top three violations were:
1. Help and Documentation
2. Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
3. Error Prevention
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We noticed that many of the violations related to helping the user navigate throughout the website. In addition, there is a lack of information to help the users understand the content of the website. These findings help us pinpoint where we should focus our efforts on when trying to improve the usability of the site.

Pre-testing
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We also conducted usability testing of the current tool. We decided to conduct these tests with both novice and expert users of the tool, and was able to identify current pain points users are experiencing.The pain points identified were very heavy cognitive loads for novice user and an unnecessary amount of clicks for expert users. We asked participants to complete three scenario based tasks that were provided by our sponsor.
1. participant to use the master map to analyze veteran population of an area.
2. participant to use the graph feature to compare civilian and unemployment rates.
3. participant to use the master map again to locate available resources in a certain area.
We used these tasks because they were identical to tasks that a user would perform regularly on the website.

Takeaways from pre-testing
1. Novice participants were overwhelmed by the website which caused the participant to become confused about what to do.
2. The interface of the website is not intuitive to the participants as they were unsure which tool would be helpful to them.
3. The participants were unsure if they were completing the tasks correctly because there was a lack of feedback.
4. Redundant clicks caused the participant to become frustrated. They were focused on the unnecessary clicks rather than completing the task.
5. The participants knew how to use the master map, but the task was still not completed due to an error. The map did not inform the participant of this error until the end, and they had to go through the task again to fix the error.

Ideation

The Annual Report
Our sponsor wanted to show the 2017 Annual Report at the very beginning of the website, and it should be at the front and center of the page. The 2017 Annual Report is a summary of 2017’s data and it will be released on May 14th. It includes a lot of useful information they collected and Measuring Communities hopes this report can attracts more users. We had a couple of sketches to show how we are going to put the report at the front page. But there were too many things we need to include (user information collecting form, info of Lite vs. Pro) on the front page. We thought the page is going to be too heavy, then we decided to have a landing page before users can get into the front page.

We did a couple of sketches for potential layouts for the design.

Testing

We conducted a quick and dirty testing to get a quick understanding/analysis of people's preferences and thoughts towards the pages designed. From this task we would provide the 2 to different variations of the same page and grab a group of novice users. We would individually ask them to review the page and then give us their preference of which they preferred. 
We choose to make the better design into wireframes so the design will appear cleaner and more organized.

Wireframe

Finally the designs were moved into grey scale digital mockups, which were than passed to Measuring Communities management team and developers to make web tool implementation decisions on what aspects would be implemented into the web tool. For this prototype, we used Mockingbird Wireframe.

Reflection

This project was the first UX project I was a part of that was sponsored by a company, which gave me a first hand experience on an industry based project. I learned a lot about web related components and design and got a kick start about how design will impact the smallest parts of the experience. Our sponsors were extremely satisfied with our final deliverable and decided to take it forward. They already updated their website based on our design and you can see it here: http://measuringcommunities.org

Measuring Communities, Spring 2018