Aore

Website Usability Evaluation for Association of Outdoor Recreation Education

Project Overview

The Association of Outdoor Recreation and Education is an association that provides services to professionals and students in the field of outdoor recreation and education. The organization will adopt a new system in April. In order to improve their website interface, they asked our group to find out the user’s thoughts and needs.

Time

Dec. '15 - Mar. '16

My Role

UX Researcher
Project Manager

Skills

Comparative Analysis
Interaction Map
Interview
Survey
Usability Testing

Dissecting the Website - Interaction Map

Based on the clients’ Information, we focused on three main interactive functions of the AORE website, which are Membership, News, Give.

Focus on the Needs - Interviews

The client wanted to know how they could improve the website. Interviews help us understand the users’ needs. We interviewed 3 current users and 2 potential users, and discovered many discrepancies between the stakeholder’s expectation and the user’s needs.

We summarized three key findings after the interviews:

  • Users want credible and organized sources of information.
  • Users seek for professional suggestions when they have question.
  • Users have the needs to build connections with others.
persona 01 persona 02 persona 03

Learn from Others - Comparative Analysis

We conducted a comparative analysis to explore the possible solutions for the needs we discovered in the interviews. Our group brainstormed to further filter out our final list of competitors, and we tried to increase the diversity of the competitors.



competitors


competitive analysis

Heuristic Evaluation

To evaluate the functionality and the interaction flow of the website, we used Nielsen's 10 heuristics.

  1. Visibility of the system status.
  2. Match between the system and the real world.
  3. User control and freedom.
  4. Consistency and standards.
  5. Error prevention.
  6. Recognition rather than recall.
  7. Flexibility or efficiency of use.
  8. Aesthetic or minimalistic design.
  9. Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors.
  10. Help and documentation.

Red: Severe usability problem.

Usability Testing

To better understand the difficulties of interaction, we conducted usability tests with six participants including one pilot study.

sketching solution

we were able to find the limitations of AORE’s current website. We identified six findings. There are findings that align with our previous findings in the heuristic evaluation and some new findings that were not revealed in the heuristic evaluation. We ranked the six findings by the severity:

  • Mismatch between function and name
  • Superdense text per page
  • Unpredictable/anomalous design features
  • Poor navigability in Member Portal Overview
  • Illogical website hierarchy
  • Redundant functions and categories

Final Video