Pre-work UX/UI (6): Final Case
This is the last pre-work exercise, which its main objective is to test and analyze different aspects of a university website, in order to detect its main pain points and try to fix them by making a paper prototype.
For this final case, I have decided to chose:
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly known as Virginia Tech, is an American public, land-grant, research university with a main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, educational facilities in six regions statewide, and a study-abroad site in Switzerland. Through its Corps of Cadets ROTC program, Virginia Tech is also designated as one of six senior military colleges in the United States.
As Virginia’s third-largest university, Virginia Tech offers 225 undergraduate and graduate degree programs to some 30,600 students and manages a research portfolio of $513 million, the largest of any university in Virginia. The university fulfills its land-grant mission of transforming knowledge to practice through technological leadership and by fueling economic growth and job creation locally, regionally, and across Virginia.
Usability test:
In this case, my user is my friend Fabio, he is 22 years old and is studying Economics (1 year to finish). He is deciding which Master studies could fit better with him, so he has already visited several university websites for the last few months.
He reads a lot about economics and is always updated with news related to that, he is quite obsessed with crypto currencies. He also likes technology, if you want to buy a new phone or computer, he is the one that has watched and read all reviews and will give you all details and information about it.
Tasks:
He had around 7 seconds to get in touch with the website and give me some comments about it. In general, he liked it, thought that has clear structure with not many text on it, what makes it clean and easy to move around without any disturbance on it. He also liked that main categories are located on the top, so you do not have to spend time looking for them.
After that, some tasks needed to be done, in order to get him to play more in detail with the website and see if he could achieve them. He needed to find:
1- The school mascot
2- If the school offers foreing language instruction for Arabic
3- The nearest airport to the school
Results:
1- The school mascot: I was quite surprised with the result of this task, he solved it with just 1 click, but he confessed to me that was not really sure to find it there, he had in mind where to search it afterwards if he could not find it in that category/subcategory.
He went directly to About category and then to History and Tradition subcategory and find it almost at the end of that page. If he could not find it there, he was thinking on Student Life or More categories.
One thing that he did not like once he got into History and Traditions subcategory was that there was a lot of text and content.
“Home page is really well structured and composed but once you get into some subcategories you could find all text that was not shown before.”
2- If the school offers foreing language instruction for Arabic: this task was more complicated to be completed because there is any information about it, so Fabio gave up after searching on most categories and subcategories that could fit better with this topic. He decided to use the search tool but he only got some information about foreign studies in which Arabic culture and language, as other foreign languages were studied.
3- The nearest airport to the school: this tasks was completed with 2 clicks. First thing he did was to have a quick look on categories to see if there was any of them that could give you this information. When he realize that it was not in any category he went to the bottom of the website because he told me that usually this information is there, with all contact and direction details.
He found there Maps & Locations, where he found a lot of information related to different locations and maps of the campus. There was one link there that said Directions to Campus and where you can find how to get to the campus by car, plane, bus or train.
“I wish that this information was more reachable because there is a lot of international students and students from different states that may not know this kind of information.”
Solutions:
In general, it is a good website, the problem is that maybe there is too much information once you get into different subcategories. I really liked how categories and subcategories are displayed and that you can find some of them that are more relevant or used once you scroll down. They also gives you the chance to access different information depending who you are, which could be really useful because there could be different kind of users with differing needs.
My solution is related to Maps & Locations topic. There is an interactive map from the campus and surroundings available and I think they can take advantage of this interactive map (not really helpful, there are no directions, just shows you where the place you are looking for). In my opinion this is a good idea but has a lot more potential.
The problem is that they have a lot of links and different maps depending on what you are looking for. My idea is to get most of this information in just one site, I think they can do this in more than one page because they usually use a lot of links and pages individually. It would be a good idea trying to display some information in another way in order to get a better result and a more clear interface, and of course, more reachable (home page, would be used daily).
I have added the Map option as a slide menu so once you click on it, you will get a view from the campus but with more useful information for students. I think this could also better and easy to manage if it is based on Google Maps, people is more familiar with it and will avoid to create that interactive map that has some limitations such as, directions, bookmarks, sharing option…
There are much more things that could be improved in this website but due to it was related with the tasks from before I thought this would be a good chance to improve something that I consider is really important. People could get directions to go faster or to manage their time in a better way, obviously having all campus locations registered but if you want to go outside the campus you will also be able to go further with this map.
