4 skills highlighted.
Research Planning, Heuristic Evaluation, Outreach, and Account Management.
Getting Context
The timing was perfect.
A friend and mentor, and I, wanted to support a non-profit by leveraging our UXR skills. We connected with Third Act, a non-profit that supports seniors in activism, to help out.
Third Act was going to be overhauling their website and wanted to increase the completion rate of desired actions supporting Third Act activist initiatives and campaigns. The timing was perfect to bring us on.
Relationship building is key.
We set out to establish expectations and build a rapport. We began by talking with our key stakeholder, a campaign strategist, who would manage our project.
To learn how to best support and communicate with him and other key stakeholders, we asked how they wanted to be involved, and the teams responsible for managing and designing their site.
To learn where we could have the most impact as researchers, we asked how they were currently getting feedback from their end users, what upcoming initiatives were priorities and why, what questions they wanted to be answered about their users, and what questions they wanted to be answered about their UX and why.
These initial conversations gave us the high-level view we needed to propose a project.
Proposing Research
The goal, and a methodology.
After hearing about their needs, we defined a project goal to identify the challenges Third Act users face when completing core tasks that inhibit their completion.
We chose a method that would evaluate the core tasks Third Act wanted performed by users. For each core task, we would asses the most common tenants and traps based using the UI Trap Framework, conceptualized by two research leaders in the industry: Michael Medlock and Steve Herbst.
Success is defined by the method.
Each core tasks would be reviewed against the UI Trap Heuristics and rated per the below:
Cosmetic violation: experience could be more pleasing but the violation should not keep users from completing the desired task or action
Minor violation: experience could be more efficient and errors could be reduced, but users will most likely be able to complete the task
Major violation: heuristic violation could keep users from completing the desired task or action
Time for the Zoom!
We had an understanding of the base needs of our client, the composition of their team, how to collaborate and communicate, what the available data was, a developed methodology, and metrics. We proposed the project details over a Zoom to our stakeholder and the project was approved.
Executing Research
The core tasks were priority.
To start, we worked with the key stakeholders at Third Act and procured a list of the “core tasks” to evaluate.
Once we had our core tasks listed out, we were able to assign priority and get started with our review using the UI Traps method.
Analyzing Findings & Making Recommendations
Top 5 tasks to focus on.
We reviewed each Core Task and related violations to identify the Core Tasks that required the most attention by analyzing the count and severity of violations for each Core Task (priority action). We called out the top 5 to improve first based on these metrics.
Additionally, we provided a summary for each of the Core Tasks reviewed. This included the details of each identified violation and our corresponding recommendations for improvement. As an example, below is our summary of major violations for the core cask “signing up for working groups by affinity or geography.”
Let’s focus on 60+ year olds.
We reviewed the severity of violations by UI Tenant types and called out what we believed were most important for their target demographic (60+).
Given the senior demographic, we concluded that the priority lay in addressing memory challenges, feature visibility, and responsiveness. For example, we suggested they remove the rotating image feature in the carousels (on their home, resources, and action pages) to lessen memory challenges and to show a static list of featured actions. Additionally, we suggested that Third Act simplify the user journey by:
visually prioritizing action buttons/prompts to create efficiency
removing circular paths (when a button leads back to the page the user is on, such as on the newsletter sign-up page where we found this)
making text explanations secondary to action buttons on section landing pages.
Reflecting and Learning
More data would have been nice.
Our contact had mentioned some data the team had in-house from their inbox and post-virtual-event surveys. We should have pushed to incorporate this into our review. I believe combining the user-generated data with the findings of our heuristic evaluation would have allowed us to more accurately prioritize the most impactful UX changes to make.
The scope could have been better
Originally, we had proposed an additional study in the research plan; a user interview with 10 participants to gather direct feedback from users to guide recommendations and prioritization of changes that would improve Third Act website user experience. The participant profile we had put together included Third act users 60+ with a variety of involvement levels, and with at least one self-reported disability.
This was proposed as a 60-90 min interview starting with a moderated interview to include questions to uncover motivations, barriers to participation, and user challenges, with a 30-minute usability component at the end. The usability component would have been based on priority actions determined by Third Act based on their goals, such as to increase particular actions or results. However, because the timeline for the user interviews seemed long, the Third Act team preferred the heuristic evaluation as the plan of action.
I believe direct user-generated feedback would have enabled us to work with the Third Act team to focus more on what to define as priority actions and Core Tasks, by basing these on a combination of observed user challenges, user-defined desires, and Third Act’s goals. As a result, I believe this component of our originally proposed research plan would have helped us better support the organization’s overall goals.