Consilience Coaching:
Usability Testing and
Findings + Recommendation Report
Background
Consilience Coaching came to the UX Design team at Prime Academy, asking us to evaluate the usability of their marketing website. The goal for the client was to help find opportunities to attract and inform potential clients, while encouraging lead generation and sales.
The goal for the users was to give them enough information on the services the site provides so they can have more confidence that they are getting the service they want. The do that, we want users be able to easily navigate the site, and get into contact with the coach running the site if they want.
Methods and Deliverables
Heuristic analysis
Usability testing and think aloud evaluations
Findings and recommendations report
Heuristic Analysis
The first step was performing Heuristic Analysis on the existing site. This meant analyzing the site through the lens of Nielsen Norman’s Usability Heuristics, and finding points where it succeeded or violated the heuristics. We then were able to rank the severity of heuristic violations and determine how critical they were to fix based on how much they impacted user flow.
This led to a very comprehensive sense of every page on the website, and the expected paths users would take. It identified stumbling points and provided a baseline for where the site was at. It also informed how we wrote the script that we used to interview users, as well as allowed us to get a full sense of the user perspective to keep in mind as we continued testing with actual users.
Script Planning
After considering the heuristic analysis, the team wrote out a script to use when doing usability testing with participants. We were able to take into account our own stumbling points, and because we had spent a while analyzing and going over the site ourselves, we could map out some expected paths the users would take and decide what questions to prompt them with to get them to attempt certain actions.
The main few tasks we asked users to complete were 1) comparing available packages, 2) selecting one, and 3) checking out and scheduling their service. Completing these tasks got most users to interact with all of the pages on the site, and allowed them to cover all the ground that the user goals require.
Usability Interviews
The Usability Interviews followed Think Aloud Protocol - the team asked users to navigate the site and say everything they were doing and thinking out loud. We gave them limited prompting beyond asking questions.
The team tasked with these interviews completed 11 interviews in total, from a range of ages, genders, and professions. This gave us a large amount of data to sort through and find themes within.
These interviews gave us insight into the biggest needs for the users - it was immediately clear what all the users were stumbling over and what might be more niche points of feedback.
Synthesis
After laying all of the interview data out in Affinity Diagrams, we began pulling out some themes and patterns.
While going through this process, the team focused on whether the user was able to fulfill the client’s goals, and then examined whether the user was able to complete their own goals throughout the process.
Some clear threads starting popping out - users had a lack of clarity about the differences in the site’s offerings, confusion about the name of the site, and complaints about how wordy some of the sections and pages were. These all overlapped and linked together to give a sense of general confusion throughout, so our job was to parse out what was causing that, and suggest changes to specific elements of the site to fix the issues.
Findings and Recommendations
Synthesizing all the data resulted in the Findings and Recommendations report, which was the final deliverable for the client. Each member of the team produced their own report.
This report covered a lot of ground - focusing on the biggest issues that our participants brought up in interviewing, as well as giving some basic fixes and general design tips to help the client bring their site together. All of these insights were meant to benefit the user, and in the process fulfill the client goals.
A lot of the issues and themes were around users not knowing exactly what the site offered, and a general lack of confidence. While keeping the user goals in mind, these recommendations are meant to rectify those issues by tackling different elements of the site. , The goal of the changes is for users to have a full understanding of this site much more quickly than they do now. Having additional clarity and quicker understanding will boost user confidence as well. This will allow the client to communicate more effectively to customers and achieve their goals.
NOTE: Knowing that the client does not have a dedicated design team, I included a few pages on general design tips that would be helpful for first-time website designers. In future cases, I wouldn’t include that on a report going towards a design team.
Learning and Next Steps
The findings report was the final deliverable from me, and the end of my involvement in the site. Going forward, the client will take it, and the rest of the feedback from the team, and go forwards on updating their site to better meet their goals. Since this report was based off of a good deal of user research, it should help the client produce a site that better helps the users meet their goals.