What working as a Usability Assistant for a University Marketing team has taught me about driving change in large organizations.

Kevin Lee
Kevin Lee
Sep 1, 2018 · 5 min read

I worked as a Usability Assistant for the University of Idaho during my graduate school years. If you’ve heard of it, I will give you a hug, and a potato joke.

The job was to serve as the “expert” in usability and help in the redesign and branding of the University. But the position was labeled as an internship and I didn’t consider myself anything near an expert. I mean, I had a few projects under my belt and a desire to make a real impact at most. I was excited, but a little nervous.

The first week I started my job, I was thrown straight into the deep end. It was my mission to figure out how to make their admissions page easier to navigate. The page looked like this at the time:

Admissions pages want you to apply

I didn’t know where to start, I felt I still needed some guidance to what exactly I was going to do. I thought, should I run a usability test? We talk all the time about running these tests in class but we never really do run one. I only had a week and a limited pool of experience, so I eventually decided to run a heuristic evaluation on the page. I used the design principles of Nielsen, Schneiderman, and Tognazzini. My first time doing this was a struggle. I sat there for probably 2 hours looking at the page like it was my girlfriend (without the feelings of love) to find anything wrong with it. I did find that the page flow didn’t really work to achieve their main goal: convince prospective students to apply for the university. I also I wrote about minor problems like buttons were not consistent in their interactions and that the breadcrumbs were small and hard to notice. I compared them to UCLA:

UCLA tells a story to students about who they are and what they’ve achieved, they bring you in by showing what you could be at their institution.

I felt an air of relief, I did it! I’m a Usability expert! That’s what I felt until my next assignment, and the next, and the next. I felt this air of tension each time I was given assignments, and I was given all kinds of things to do:

I worked on their financial pages figuring out what kind of architecture worked with card sorts, I did A/B tests to find the best configuration of buttons and images, I used heatmaps, recordings, and user flows to see how people interacted with these pages. I was basically running different methods to get some practice of different tests while fulfilling the requirements I was given by my boss. I started to feel good about myself! That was until they put me on their “Degree Finder” page.


Big Project, Big Responsibilities

Degree Finder was the University baby, it was a born from the decline of enrollment in Idaho for colleges. It was an large investment in by the higher ups to draw students into the university.

I was tasked to run a usability study on Degree Finder and see what worked and what didn’t. I never wrote a real test plan, and I never wrote a protocol for a study up until this point. I didn’t really even understand my user and what their motivations were for using a page like this. Nonetheless, I went ahead and ran the study because my team wanted it.

Degree Finder supposed to attract students to our university but the web traffic said otherwise

I wrote a very basic protocol for it: It had a few tasks, identify 3 majors you are interested in, find information regarding them like how long it would take and what fields you could go into from it, I asked them to think aloud and I recorded it with a loaner laptop with a screen recorder. My criteria were any college students, but I leaned toward freshman since they were the closest thing to a high school student we could get without going through major hoops.

Oh, and I had no budget to run any of my tests, so I did a hallway sampling where I asked people to participate in my study, I gave them candy if they did . (it was Twix so people definitely participated)

It was nerve racking to ask the people at first but after doing it a few times, it wasn’t so bad, and I was done! I collected 15 participants! I looked over my footage and notes and I wrote up my report! (A lot of people were struggling to find meaning in the platform and were looking for information that wasn’t available without digging deep.) It was an exciting time for me as I thought they were going to make a change!


Learning a Hard Lesson

While I learned a lot about running tests, writing reports, and satisfying my bosses, something always felt missing in my repertoire. after all those months of running tests and sending in reports, What did I have to show for it?

Nothing. None of my recommendations were made, the pages stayed the same 6 months after I had submitted my reports and it was a terrible feeling. The administration had all the say in what changes were implemented, and they didn’t see any of my findings to be valid for them. This is where I learned my hard lesson, It doesn’t matter what kind of work you do or recommendations you make, if you can’t convince your stakeholders to make changes, you won’t be able to drive any change. I was heartbroken, but I looked forward to my graduation. So I hid it in the recesses of my mind to worry about after I found a job. I work now for another large organization that is resistant and slow to change. But this time, I’m working on convincing my stakeholder one by one to make the changes to advocate for my users.