CONTEXT
    I conducted an extensive usability study on The Michigan Daily's web interfaces with three other students. I gained experience with comparative analyses, heuristic evaluations, designing personas and scenarios, interviewing users, designing surveys, designing and conducting usability and card sorting tests, and designing interaction maps.

    MY ROLE IN THIS PROJECT

    I proposed the topic of our project, provided institutional knowledge on the Daily to guide our research and spearheaded our competitive analysis. Otherwise, my team of four split work evenly. We designed usability tests, created interaction maps and a survey and wrote report material collectively. Individually, we conducted usability tests, user interviews and card sorting tests, as well as each creating a persona and scenario based on our research.
    INTERACTION MAPS

    We designed interaction maps to understand the user flow of the website.

    This interaction map shows the places you can navigate to from the search bar.

    This interaction map shows interfaces accessible once you get to a story page from home.

    PERSONAS & SCENARIOS
    We interviewed one professor, five students, two Ann Arbor residents, one parent and one alum to gain knowledge of typical users of the Daily, and to guide our personas and scenarios. One of my interviews was with a University of Michigan lecturer who frequently reads the Daily in print. Based on this interview, I created this persona and scenario. My teammates created two more, representing a student and an Ann Arbor resident.
     
    MAIN ISSUES
    Many users were confused by the naming of “Statement” section. It's a weekly magazine with long-form stories and personal essays, but most readers appear unfamiliar with the name and prominent feature on the navigation bar. Instead, the Daily could simply say “Magazine” or omit it and place content throughout the website. It is a print publication, after all — and not all web architecture has to reflect that of print.

    Many of the users who participated in our usability test cited issues using the search bar. Users were unable to find recent videos or content from specific dates. Users also cited the search bar as a common and critical way to find content.

    Other identified problems included frustration with Facebook comments not allowing for anonymity and the importance of the multimedia page. Users said it photo and video content should be categorized with Sports, News, Arts and other sections rather than having a specific page.

    WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY

    The purpose of this project was to give us a broad overview of many user research methods, while conducting real research. If I were to conduct a similar analysis, I would use fewer methods based on the needs of the project. One error we made in our usability testing was not testing it enough before we ran tests with participants. In the future, I would be more careful when designing these tests and do several practice runs before running with real users.  

    OUR FULL USABILITY REPORT can be viewed here.