Usability Case study and redesign
Final assignment
Introduction
For this final assignment we are going to experiment 2 important phases about the design thinking process : the usability test and fast reprototyping.
Company
For this exercice, I decided to picked up University of Connecticut’s website as the subject of the test.

The University of Connecticut is one of the top public research universities in the United States, with more than 30,000 students pursuing answers to critical questions in labs, lecture halls, and the community. Knowledge exploration throughout the University’s network of campuses is united by a culture of innovation. An unprecedented commitment from the state of Connecticut ensures UConn attracts internationally renowned faculty and the world’s brightest students. A tradition of coaching winning athletes makes UConn a standout in Division l sports and fuels our academic spirit. As a vibrant, progressive leader, UConn fosters a diverse and dynamic culture that meets the challenges of a changing global society.
Context of the test
Let’s talk about the context and our tester. the user will be a young father in his thirties living in France, who studied in an university, used to be IT engineer, and is now a CEO of a small company. It’s important to precise it because depending of the person (his background) the tester will focus on differents matter. We will do the test on a macbook pro 15" touch bar.
Questions
Here are the questions we are going to ask to the user :
- After few seconds to get a first impression of the website, we will ask them to give us a small phrase or a group of adjectives.
- Then, We will ask them what they think about the navigation of the site.
- And finally we will ask them to find :
1. The school mascot;
2. If the school offers foreign language instruction for Arabic;
3. The nearest airport to the school.
During the test, we won’t influence or guide the user until the very dead end.
Some helpful tool
Like the last time for the interview exercice, recording the test can be a very helpful tool. That way we will be recording the whole test and track every user’s actions and clicks. Thanks to the time code, we will also know how much time the user will spend to find the info.
It also provided a good database for the project team and client. It can be serve as a proof of the need to change.

Results

First impression
At first sight, the tester thinks that the website is pretty cleared , welcoming, reactive, the picture seems to be representing the campus but it is not very warm picture (must be taken on Fall). For him, that pictures make him think that university looks like to be very into Biology and Food Industry. Also it doesn’t have any pictures of students in action.

A navigation with scratches
After few clicks, issues started to appeared :
- The user didn’t see the bar nav at the top and keep forgetting it exists..
- It has too many buttons. Some button seem not to be that important to be displayed at the homepage. Some of them seem to be useless like the “AZ” button
- He thinks it was difficult to find school programs provided by university to him it is the most important thing to display. At least he found the different schools and campuses.
- “Admissions” should be in “school programs” page.
- “Athletics” should be in “Campus life”.
- “UCONN health” should be in “Research”and “Research” should be in “academics”.
- He thinks that the words used here are not adapted for each branch.
- He would like to see the “contact us” button and social network buttons.
- When he navigated on different pages, he thinks it is overloaded of informations.
- The search button open a search page.
- The plan site is very complex. It’s like walking in a supermarket trying to find specific products(that’s actually a strategy 😔).
- Also when he clicked on some links (related links) it open a new tab. So you don’t know if you are still on the university website. It doesn’t follow the same architecture.
- No foreign languages purposed. Not a big deal but still, for an international school…
- A fixed bar nav would be welcomed.
- The search button lead us to another page instead of a regular search text field.


To sum up it has issues on two dimensions : words ans visual representation
- Words chosen were kind of confusing, it can lead us to the wrong pages.
- The overload of buttons and contents make the interface poor in term of intuitiveness. Also the lack of consistency between each page make it more confusing.

Those issues affect on the 4th and 5th dimension of IxD : Time spent by the user and emotion the user. He might be tempted to quit the website and look on google where he can get note accurate information and in the worst case scenario, not applying for any admission.
Because of the complexity, it must be also hard to make it responsive and navigate on an other device like smartphone (3rd dimension).
For exemple look carefully about the size of “Plan your visit” link below.


Searching for specific informations
At the beginning of the test, I asked him to find it without using the search bar and only just by clicking.
Looking for specific informations was really hard. It was playing the game “Where is Waldo?”.

Where is “Jonathan the husky”?
For the mascot, he founded it by chance from our first navigation by clicking on “admission>prospective student page”. And it’s not even a page dedicated to it. He admitted that it has more his place on “about us”, “athletics” or “our campus life” page.

We tried looking for it on the athletics pages but after some few clicks we landed on another website to buy tickets and that redirects us on google search page instead of an error page. We found out later on Google an wiki, that the name of the mascot is Jonathan.
Does the school offer foreign language instruction for Arabic ?
For this information he couldn’t really find it just by navigating, so after spending 10 minutes clicking randomly, he decided to use the search bar. We found out useful informations about arabic intructions offered and who to contact.
Where is the nearest airport ?
The tester tried looking for the nearest airport by clicking on “plan your visit”, but could only find “how to plan a tour” and directions.



Then he used the search page and type “airport”. The information we were looking for appeared on the 4th position.


He admitted that if he could, he would use google map instead of the website.
My though
In conclusion using the search page helps a lot but the results are general. It can be on articles, news feeds and student’s posts. It’s a googling experience.
Solving a problem
After collecting all the datas of the user path, we will try to solve the problem but we have to take in account that French people and American people have a different approach about schools and sports.
As mentionned above, we might need to think a little bit of the architecture of the whole roadmap but here we will only apply some quick changes on the landing page in accordance with the tester needs.
My changes :
- Remove the header menu at the top : because too small and useless.
- Set the top bar nav fixed.
- Place social network links at the top right.
- Put an automatic slider where we will put pictures of the campus but also students, the mascot, … that will improve the communication and make the website more dynamic.
- Put a bigger button of “Plan your visit”. Also we will add where is the nearest airport on this page.
- Add a Search Text Field at the right instead of a button.
- We also add a language button might be interesting.

- Add a “Contact us” button where you can fill a contact form, the adress and how to get at UCONN.


- Add “Home” button to get back and see “News”, “Featured events”, and “Strategic initiatives”.
- Put the “Admission”, “Research” and “UCONN Health” in “Academics” sections to simplify the Bar Nav.
- Add a little description of each section button instead when you rollover it.
- We can put the “Athletics” button in the “Campus life” but as I said French people and American people have a different approach of sport in general. In USA, it is part of their DNA.




- Add a breadcrumb to each page to

What I get from that exercice
That exercise make me practice the last phases of the Design thinking process : testing and reprototyping. I learned a lot from it and of course if it wasn’t only an exercice, I would push it a little bit further, iterating again and again and also a different audience.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I do. See you soon and stay tuned.😎🙌






