Karen McCullough User Experience Designer

Project Details / Process

I engaged the external teams early on to connect on recruiting students for an anticipated usability study and kept them in the loop with continued communication when the timeline continued to shift throughout the project due to challenges with the vendor. This allowed stakeholders to anticipate the last-minute, critical turn-around times and find alternate student participants quickly.

As the timeline for this project continued to change, it started to look like a usability study for the MVP just wasn’t going to be possible. However, just before the sprint that included user-acceptance testing (UAT), the internal CRM team and vendor met to discuss the plan and I was able to see an opportunity in the conversation to nudge the project stakeholders to include students in this testing phase of the MVP.

I conducted user research with five current students and one recent graduate on their experience with the portal in order to test the usability of key tasks and functionality. Testing sessions were reviewed to identify any large usability issues, help prioritize training and communication topics, help prioritize information to better match student expectations and to look for common trends to better prioritize long-term improvements.

Specific questions we wanted to answer were:

• Do students run into issues with navigation, labels or have other usability issues?
• What topics, functionality or features are most important to students for training?
• How do students prioritize different tasks in the portal based on frequency and importance?

I conducted a four-part remote moderated usability test, which included the following methods:

• Think aloud: students talked aloud about what they saw and what they were thinking as they were navigating the portal.
• Task analysis: students were asked to walk through specific tasks using scenarios for context so they could provide feedback on different screens.
• Task mapping: participants were asked to organize 16 cards representing top portal tasks by frequency and level of importance.
• Exit interview: students were asked additional follow-up questions.

I was not only able to navigate final recruiting, technical and timing challenges to complete testing with six study participants, analysis and reporting in less than four days, but learned new technology on the fly (Reframer in Optimal Workshop) in order tag, analyze and review results and provide actionable insights for both the MVP and areas of focus for training to key stakeholders in the timeframe we needed. All this was in addition to having to change the scope of the testing plan at the last minute as well.