Henry Art - Usability Study

University of Washington

Winter 2020

Designing and conducting a usability study to provide our stakeholder with data on how users interact with their website and capture evidence to prioritize a future redesign.

For the full report, please click here

Problem

The Henry Art Gallery is an internationally recognized art museum located on the University of Washington campus. Their website has been added to over the years by different people without much oversight, making the website complicated and often difficult to use.

As the website is quite vast, our team decided to focus our testing on the navigation menus in order to gauge the usability of the websites structure and organization.

Recruitment & Logistics

Our recruitment and testing all took place in a little over a week .

Recruitment was done through various social media channels including a local Reddit community (r/seattle) and various Facebook groups. Based on our stakeholder meeting, we decided on the following screener criteria for potential participants in the study:

1. Age 18 and over

2. Local to Seattle (having lived here for at least one year)

3. Interested in art/museums

4. Not been to the Henry art Gallery in the last 2 months

5. Not currently affiliated with the University of Washington

Our stakeholders wanted to expand beyond the University of Washington community, which is why we wanted local participants rather than students. We also did not want regular patrons of the museum, so that participants would have as little familiarity with the website as possible. This is also why we did not state we were working with the Henry in our recruitment posts, but simply said “a local art museum”.

Testing sessions were planned to create the most ease for the participants.

As we only had a week to test, we conducting our testing sessions wherever was most convenient to the participant. This included a meeting space in the actual museum, study spaces in libraries, and even participants’ homes. Our only constraint was that we needed it to be relatively quiet to record the session, and we needed table space for the activities.

Study Design & Methodology

PLanning our study without any previous user research as guidance.

Each member of our team conducted a quick heuristic evaluation to familiarize ourselves with the website. This initial evaluation in conjunction with clarifying our client’s objectives, allowed us to narrow our main objective to testing the navigation of The Henry’s website. Our study used three different usability study approaches for our sessions:

1. Card Sorting (Generative)

2. Website Tasks (Evaluative)

3. Oral Debrief and Post-Test Questionnaire

Think-Aloud

Throughout the whole session, we asked participants to think-aloud while they were working. This allowed us to get more insight on how participants worked through the problems in front of them and what led them to the decisions they were making. This was incredibly valuable in recognizing motivations and frustrations that the participants were experiencing during the testing session.

Card Sorting

First, we gave the participants 33 different labels that were printed on a small piece of paper. These labels were taken directly from the navigation menus of The Henry’s website. We asked participants to group the labels into categories were natural and intuitive to them. We didn’t limit how many groupings they were allowed to make or how many labels should be in each grouping. It was completely open to the participant’s interpretation.

After the initial groupings, we asked participants to point out any words that they found difficult to define or put into context with the others. We asked them to title their groupings using an already existing label or by writing a new label that they thought would best fit the category. Lastly, we asked them to pick their top three categories that they thought contained the most pertinent information for an art museum’s website.

Website Tasks

Second, we asked participants to complete a list of tasks using The Henry’s website. We created scenarios for the tasks that pertained to topics we had established as part of our research objectives. The tasks covered the following topics:

1. Museum Address

2. Hours of Operation

3. Upcoming Exhibitions

4. E-Newsletter Signup

5. Social Media Icons

6. Ticketing Information

7. Archived Collection Search (requested by the sponsor)

While the participants were going through the tasks we observed their pathways and whether they were able to complete the task without any assistance from the moderator.

Oral Debrief and Post-test questionnaire

Lastly, we went through an oral debrief and post-test questionnaire with the participants. This allowed more details about participant’s decisions during the session to surface. We also collected information regarding the participants experience, interaction, and overall satisfaction with the website. The post-test questionnaire included likert scales, rank order, and short answer questions which gave us more quantitative data to analyze as most of our study focused on qualitative data.

FIndings

Our team started by analyzing the captured data in an affinity diagram to find emerging themes.

Each sticky note contains a quote from a participant during a session, which was then grouped into one of the categories below:

Summary & Severity Scope

On almost all accounts, the findings from the usability study had to do with confusion regarding terms, and just a general lack of organizations of the website. All the issues uncovered appeared equally important, and most created inconvenience but were not catastrophic in nature. While a few participants failed to complete certain tasks, they still managed to get most of the information they needed. Instead of using a severity scale, we created two categories:

1. Short-term recommendations: includes those findings which we determined will be quicker to fix and will potentially require less resources. We suggest these changes be implemented as soon as possible within the current website.

2. Long-term recommendations: includes the findings which would be addressed once the Henry Art Gallery starts working on a full redesign of the website, as is their plan in the future. These recommendations will require a reconsideration for the site’s information architecture and overall design theme.

Overview of Findings

1. Over-labeling and unclear language of menu options caused indecision and dead end

2. Sensitive navigation menu made it difficult for users to click on subpages

3. Lack of discoverability of the info bar frustrated users looking for quick information

4. Multiple users requested a calendar to learn about upcoming exhibits and events

5. All users expected to find information regarding how to purchase tickets

6. Readability of text on website was difficult because of color contrast and font size

7. Infinite scrolling and slow to load homepage resulted in drop-off and confusion

Recommendations

As we mentioned before, short-term recommendations include the findings which we determined will be quicker to fix and will require less resources. Long-term recommendations include the findings which would be addressed once the Henry Art Gallery starts working on a full redesign of the website, as is their plan in the future.

Short-Term Recommendations

1. Add a calendar for current and upcoming exhibitions and events

   This would provide quick information for visitors and allow them to see upcoming events and artists.

2. Clarify ticket purchasing process

   Clarifying this process would decrease uncertainty when it comes to how and where to buy tickets.

3. Create a static footer at the bottom of all pages to offer quick access to general information

   Making the info bar static would allow users to quickly locate general information like address, hours, and social media accounts in one glance.

4. Check links within info bar (blog and calendar)

   Fixing these dead or empty links would eliminate user confusion and drop-off.

5. Create a clickable address and provide landmark directions

   This will make it easier for user’s to find their way to the gallery and lead to less frustration

Long-Term Recommendations

1. Increase font size and adjust the contrast of text color on the background for better readability

   These changes could impact the readability of the website and be more inclusive to users who may struggle with poor eyesight.

2. Simplify the main menu to guide users on clearer journey

   Paths need to be clear and firm to avoid user indecision and drop-off.

3. Eliminate infinite scroll on the home page (consider click through or carousel style imagery)

   The large amount of visuals negatively affected the usability and speed of the site. Packaging the imagery and creating a carousel would eliminate confusion.

Constraints

Limited time

Due to this being a 10-week project, we had to move quickly. We were not able to be as specific about recruiting as we would have liked.

Limited resources

The Henry Art Gallery has no previous user research, which meant we were mostly unaware about motivations of people already using the website and their pain points.

COVID-19

The impact of COVID-19 came to Washington State towards the end of this quarter. This forced us to finish conducting testing sessions with more urgency than we had anticipated. The pandemic added more stress and personal uncertainty which made the end of the quarter a little frustrating.

Reflection

Thinking back

Reflecting back on this project, I think my team and I did a great job designing our study. As there was no previous research, focusing on the navigation bar allowed us to give our stakeholders a good sense of the major issues with their website. We also learned that you have to be prepared for anything and that people are unpredictable and you need to be ready to pivot if needed. If we did this study again, we would like to get more quantitative date and also conduct a usability study for the mobile version of the website.

Thinking forward

This was my first usability project and it taught me a lot about study design and actually conducting the studies. I found that I quite enjoy conducting usability studies and hope to do more of these in the future. I find it incredibly interesting to see how users approach tasks and interactions and how their thought process leads them to make certain decisions in the interactions.