NSF I-Corps Hub: Great Lakes Region is a node of the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program. The node’s website was relaunched at the beginning of 2022 and the organization in charge of the website sought assistance in evaluating and improving the website. As a UX researcher in the student team, I help the client find out users' needs and identify usability issues through interviews, surveys, usability tests, etc. and provide recommendations.
Jan – Apr 2022
UX Researcher
Chia-Ying Hsieh
Daiwei Zhang
Jiaxuan Zhang
Qingyan Li
The goals of the website are to
(1) increase the awareness of the I-Corp programs (2) Attract people to participate in the programs
NSF I-Corps Hub: the Great Lake Region aims to
Gain a deeper understanding of the target audience
⬇
Exploratory Research
Acquire insight into the user experience of the relaunched website and improve it
⬇
Design Validation
Walk through the website to understand the site structure and interactions.
Use different colors to indicate different user tasks (e.g. explore different programs, register an event)
Based on the interviews, we made persona of each type of website users.
(1) Novice User (2) Former Participants / User (3) I-Corps Affiliate
For the comparative analysis, we discussed and selected six potential competitors based on Newman’s taxonomy (Direct Competitors, Indirect Competitors, Partial Competitors, and Parallel Competitors).
Referring features of competitors' website, we gave out recommendations such as adding photos and making the program/event list organized, setting FAQ page would help users avoid confusion, more information
can be added to the get involved page, ans so on.
The survey is for understand users’ motivation and behaviors towards the website.
In order to identify usability issues within the website interface, we conducted heuristic evaluation based on 10 different heuristics principles from Nielsen Norman.
Here are some principles with major problems.
All participants complete all tasks and complete each task within 3 mins. Most participants completed the first 3 tasks smoothly and said the navigation is easy to understand. However, participants spent twice the time on average on task 4 in comparison to the first two tasks. The followings illustrate the reasons why people have difficulties finding the assigned page and other problems bothering users while browsing the websites.
The indentation is not intuitive. One participant said that she didn't notice "success story" (level2) under "about" (level1) and thought "success story" look like another level1 item because it follows by other level1 items.
"Programs" under "About" Tab and "Event" Tab serve similar functions. If users want to attend "programs", they have to go to "events" page. It's like programs are composed of events but the relationship between the two terms is not clear for novice users.
Moreover, some participants thought they can find previous cases in "blog" or "resources" while they were actually in "success stories".
After completing research, it's time to review the questions remaining to be answered at first
(see the blue texts below).
As the bottom right (light blue) grid showing, While the website help users understand what are I-Corps programs well, there are some minor usability issues negatively influence user experiences.
The followings are some key findings and the corresponding recommendations. (We provided findings and recommendations in each research, and here are just some main ones for a recap.)
From our research, we found that When searching for the programs, users are looking for detailed information. Here’s a ranking of the main content that users are looking for. Participants value the learning experience and the outcomes. While the basic info such as contacts is their least concern.
The result of usability tests show that there could be some improvement in the navigation bar. First, all of the participants were confused about the “Event” tab on the menu and the “Programs” tab under the “About” drop down since they eventually go to the same destination. When participants attempted to find success stories from the previous users, they tend to go to the “Blog” and “Resources” tab. They told us that they intuitively thought the blogs should contain all stories.
The client accept the recommendation of combing “Success Stories” and “Blog”. Now they replace "Success Stories" page with FAQs and put the stories in "Blog"
Page Refreshing
Drop-down menu of program name
The client accept the recommendation of remove the program selection menu. Now it is unclickable.
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