Case Of Study Rice University
About Rice University
Set in the heart of Houston, Texas, the nation’s fourth-largest city, Rice is a comprehensive research university that fosters diversity and an intellectual environment that produces the next generation of leaders and advances tomorrow’s thinking.
Initial Observations
At a glance, the user interface looked busy and dated to me. The colors and shapes were inconsistent through the whole website, making the navigation confusing and complicated. Regarding information architecture, when you are navigating from one section to another, you seem to get lost fast, labels don’t apply consistently.
Defining and organizing pain points
I look for a friend to test the entire interaction with the website, telling him to perform the following tasks:
- Give her seven seconds to get a first impression of the website. Ask her to give a small phrase or a group of adjectives
- Ask her what she thinks about the navigation of the site
- Ask her to find:
- The school mascot
- If the school offers foreing language instruction for Arabic
- The nearest airport to the school
After applying a usability testing, I could be able to detect the following pain point:
Pain Points
- The navigation path is too small, and it doesn’t have a consistent use through the whole website.
- The user interface on the submenu is busy, distracting user’s navigation.
- While navigating on the main menu and clicking on any submenu, for example, Campus Life /Recreation & Fitness (See Image 1: Campus Life Menu Navigation), the main menu labels changed entirely to the submenu’s tags.
What is the main problem that you chose to solve
I will focus on the menu and submenu navigation since is the main problem the user had to perform every single task on the test. This will include, the main menu, submenus, Navigation paths and labels.
How you planned to solve this problem
By creating an accordion menu for submenu sections, we can be able to keep the main menu labels; it won’t change, this will help users to don’t get lost on the site navigation.
Eliminating the photo and using short text description on the submenu will help the user to focus more on the navigation.
Showing a consistent and more significant navigation path on every website’s screen will help users to find what section they are performing at the moment.
Prototype design
Summary
This exercise was beneficial to reaffirm some of the challenges I faced when I was using the website for the first time. The usability testing made it easier to find the main problems this website had. And doing this exercise with a potential user help me to quickly identify and solve the main pain points this website had for their users.
