Colorado Mountain School
From Usability Testing to Recommendations Report. How little changes can make a large impact.
TL;DR
A heuristic analysis was performed on a website to find all the little errors that only a UXer would notice. From there, a usability testing script was created to see if users actually cared about the things UXers noticed. Usability testing was conducted with seven participants. Data from the tests was synthesized using an affinity diagram and then used to create recommendations for the website. All these recommendations were annotated and put in a comprehensive report.
Overview
My Role: Research Interviewer and Observer
Methods: Heuristic Analysis, Usability Testing, Affinity Diagramming
Tools: Google Suite, Zoom, Trello
Deliverables: Heuristic Analysis, Usability Testing Script, Usability Testing, Findings & Recommendations Report
Team Members: Samantha Heggem and Jared Burseth
The Client and The Goal
The Colorado Mountain School is a collection of guides, educators and mentors dedicated to sharing experiences of the Rocky Mountains with those looking for a life changing experience. They are industry leaders in stewardship, professionalism, and quality of life for their employees.
At this time, Colorado Mountain School is looking to make improvements to their current website. The goal of the website is to attract new customers, keep existing customers, and maintain a reputation of being an elite group of mountain guides and educators. All recommendations made in the final report should improve these overall goals.
Heuristic Analysis
A heuristic analysis was performed to assess if users could successfully perform tasks related to the site goals. The tasks that were analyzed were: signing up for a class, booking a guide, and verifying the organization's reputation. Jakob’s Ten Usability Heuristics were used as the criteria to assess if the tasks were successful.
Major heuristic violations were found in regards to minimalist design, visibility of system status, and error prevention. These key issues were kept in mind when moving into usability testing where it would be determined if these violations prevented users from completing tasks.
Usability Testing
Testing
Testing was completed both in person and over zoom with seven participants. Participants were selected due to their love of the outdoors and past experiences with rock climbing, hiking, and wilderness travel. It was important to gather participants who would be familiar with the site’s content as their responses would indicate if the site was connecting with their client base. All participants were asked questions from the same script to ensure consistency in the research process.
The Script
The testing script consisted of five intro questions, three scenarios, and three closing questions. The intro questions were meant to gauge the participant’s experience with the website subject matter. The scenarios asked participants to complete tasks using the website, such as signing up for a course or booking a guide. It was important to focus on these tasks as they are the client’s main source of revenue. The closing questions ask participants to give their general impressions of the site.
Findings & Recommendations Report
Once testing was completed, the insights gathered were synthesized to make a Findings & Recommendations Report for the client. Major recommendations consisted of creating consistency across the site, clarifying the booking process, and highlighting what makes the organization unique. Images were annotated to clearly illustrate the changes that needed to be made. The following images are samples from the report.
Next Steps
The next phase of this project would focus on building out wireframes based on recommendations made in the report . Wireframes would help illustrate possible changes to the site. Once wireframes were created, usability testing would need to be done to verify if changes were actually helpful to users.
Conclusion
Usability testing is such an important step in UX design. Insights gathered from users were extremely helpful to gauge how important certain information is to users. This client’s site contained a lot of niche information that most people are not familiar with, that is why it was so important to find testing participants who would be familiar with the site's content.
I really enjoyed running these usability tests and I would love to do the same for your next UX project! If you are looking for some to do UX research feel free to contact me.