Exercise: Usability Case Study
Hey, this is an exercise from my UX/UI Design Bootcamp Prework. Here you can see the rest of my projects. Want to know more about me? Click here 🙌🏽 .
This is the last prework’s exercise. I’ll be doing a usability case study 0f a college website.
As is the final exercise, it’s a recap of the basic concepts related to user-center design and usability and an overview of the of the whole redesigning process.
The college I chose to make the usability case study from its website is Cornell University.
Cornell University is a private research university located in New York State. Although, it’s private their identity is clear: “Private university, public mission”. Its main campus is located in Ithaca, New York, but it has an international presence in countries such as Italy or Qatar, counting with over 20,000 students.
Along this exercise, I’m going to do a usability testing to find out what are the website’s pain points and try to fix them, improving the user experience.
Usability Testing
To find out the main pain points, I have 3 tasks for the user to complete. The tasks are:
- First impression of the Cornell University’s website.
- Thoughts about the website navigation.
- Look up what is the nearest airport to its main campus, without using the website’s internal search feature.
First impression of Cornell University’s website
The words used by the user to describe the website were:
- Flashy
- Carefully design
- Sentimental
Thoughts about the website navigation
The user was fascinated about the website navigation, the main points he pointed out were:
- The website is taken care of.
- The information architecture is clear and easy to understand.
- The design facilitates the navigation through photos, the website overview and the related links.
Look up what is the nearest airport to the college
The user needs 6 clicks to find out where the nearest airport was. He found it by reducing the map view on the Maps and Directions page.
Pain Points
The pain points surfaced when the user was looking for the nearest airport. Although there were not so many clicks to locate where the airport was, the user was pushed to do one of the following actions:
- Scroll down through the long, super long, list of locations
- Reduce the map view and search for the airport on the map
Neither these two actions are wayfinding for the user. The main pain points found while the user was looking up the nearest airport were:
- If the user chose to scroll down the list, he may not find it out because the airport’s name is Tompkins Country Airport. When the user is looking up for an airport the key word he’s looking for is airport, not the precise name. Because of that, he’ll not expect to look up a key word starting by T.
- If the user chose to look it up on the map, he may not find it out because he’s looking for a different direction.
To solve these pain point, I made the next prototype:
In the image below, you could see side by side the changes I made to resolve the pain point:
With the redesign, the user will easily find all the locations he may be looking for.
Furthermore, the user will clearly know the directions to get to the university, giving him the option to buy the tickets online (if he decided to get to the university by plane or by train).
Remember that the main pain problem for the user was looking up where the airport was. Now, the user will find the airport in just 1 click, instead of the 6 clicks of the original design.
Hope you like it!
That’s all for now,
see you real soon.
