Executive Summary

Research Questions

Participants

Task and Scenarios

Study Design

Results and Findings

Recommendations

Future Areas of Study

Highlight Reel of Significant Usability Issues

The usability team embarked on a thorough evaluation of the overall usability and readability of reporter.RIT.edu to help improve user experiences on the website.

The client wanted to improve the overall usability of the website, specifically the podcast page and the homepage layout.

Three out of four participants completed extensive usability testing of the website with a moderator and found significant issues with the navigation bar and the search tool.

Some of the recommendations include tweaking the search tool and fixing the page number issue.

Future research include increasing sample size and a comparative study on which style of navigation bar users prefer.

Can users find the podcast section quickly?

Is the navigation bar easy and clear for user to use?

Do deaf and/or hearing impaired users use the podcast with transcription page?

You and a friend are having a chat. You friend mentions to you that you really need to listen to the latest podcast on Reporter.RIT.edu as it is a topic you will find interesting. You begin at the homepage of reporter.rit.edu.

You arrive 15 minutes early for class one day. You feel this would be a good time to catch up on news related to campus. You had heard reporter.rit.edu was the recommended campus news source. You navigate to the homepage of this site.

While in class, your professor mentions that there are some upcoming policy changes coming to MyCourses. However, they could not remember what they were at the time and recommended reading about the changes on reporter.rit.edu. You navigate to the homepage of the reporter.rit.edu.

- Each participant was required to complete seven tasks in a lab setting with a computer station.
- Moderators observed and collected data on whether a task was successfully completed, usability issues, and errors.
- A within-subjects design was used in this study.
- Testing was conducted in a controlled environment.
- Testing was conducted during Fall 2019-2020 Semester.
- Each participant conducted testing with the moderator, laptop, and audio and video recording device.

- Two participants requested that the study be conducted in a public space, rather than a private study room. We complied.
- Could not play think aloud instructional video to a participant that was hard of hearing. The video did not contain captions.
- The navigation bar of the website was changed after the test plan was created. This did not affect our test plan.
- The website was down and the pilot test could not be conducted with the 4th and final participant.

While we asked the participants to find an article by giving them the Article’s title, any deviation from the exact title , via search, delivered poor results.

Corresponding page numbers on the bottom of the page. No matter what page you are on, page 1 will be highlighted.

There are some pages where clicking the search button does nothing at all. Most notably the Podcasts page.

The search tool may need to be tweaked to give broader results. Using google and entering “site:reporter.rit.edu policy mycourses” brings up the article related to that search as the 1st link, while a search for “policy mycourses” on reporter.rit.edu brings up no results. Two of our participants were unable to find this page due to the strictness of the search terms.

We recommend changing the highlight of the page numbers on the bottom of any page to reflect the actual page the user is on. It is possible this is not intended behavior.

Additional Participants Needed.

Comparative study on styles of navigation bars.