Usability Evaluation Story: Friends of Crocheron & John Golden Park

Website

Client

Friends of Crocheron & John Golden Park is a NGO, founded by Jessica Burke and Christopher Petrizzo. The organization has a mission to promote the preservation and enjoyment of the park, and to raise funds for restoration and enhancement of the park.

Project Porposal

I drafted the project proposal that included the study objective that the whole team had formulated. In the proposal I laid down the study objective for the client with details on all the things we were going to investigate in the study. Additionally, I added broad target users categories from which the team was going to recruit from. We sent this proposal to the client for any feedback they might have.

To recruit the participants from the target user demographic we created a user participation form using google forms. In this form we included questions that would help us assess participants’ interest in parks and whether they are suitable candidates for this study.

After we had all the questions on the form finalized we used several mediums for participant recruitment including the newsletter of the client organization, several social media outlets like reddit and discord, and Pratt email groups.

Once we had positive interest responses from people, we started to schedule the interviews with them using google form to mark their availability. After we had the availability of the participants we confirmed interview appointments with them.

Question #1
When was the last time you visited Crocheron park?
What do you like about the park?
What do you do there?

Question #2
Have you ever donated to the park?
How did you donate?

Question #3
Have you ever volunteered at any event in this park?
How did you register for the event?

Question #4
How familiar are you with the Friends of Crocheron website?
What have you used the website for?

History Page

Questions were asked to gauge the user interest in the content and structure of the history page.

Tasks were designed to learn how users interact with the website and whether they are able to intuitively understand the features on the history page.

Blog

Questions were designed to determine the user expectations from the blog as well as whether the blog page meets those expectations.

The tasks were constructed to help us understand how users engage with the interactive content on the blog.

Park Opportunities

Questions were framed to learn about user interests in activities and events in the park and their preferred means of participation in these events.

Tasks were designed to test the usability of the Volunteer registration process and the Donation process on the website.

Question #1
What part of the website was confusing or lacking to you?

Question #2
Anything else you would like to add?

Question #3
Do you think this website provides enough information about the park?

After the participant interviews, all the data from the interviews was filtered for problems. Further, duplicate problems were eliminated and similar problems were combined. Later these problems were assigned severity on a scale of [1 – 4]. Furthermore, user trends were observed from these problems to identify the root problems.

Solutions for these problems were formulated by the whole team, I specifically had major contributions towards the History page, Volunteer registrations and Donations. These Identified problems and their recommendations are presented in further sections.

Findings

Finding #1 : On the “Improve Our Park” page, users were confused about the difference between volunteer registration and event registration. There are multiple volunteer registration links with one of the links being broken returning a 404 error page. Additionally, the users expected registration links to be present on the event details in the calendar.

Finding #2 : When making a donation users find information about how the donations are utilized to be valuable and would like to see it on the donation page.

Finding #3 : Users want a clearer sense of the park’s chronology from the website. Users tend to enjoy the pictures and maps on the history page but don’t realize that they link to more in depth written content.

Finding #4 : Users found it difficult to search and discover blog posts due to the current layout of the blog.

Recommendations

Recommendation #1 : Create a single destination page for all the registration links from the homepage. Keep all the links consistent with the same destination webpage. Give two options once users clicks the registration button: {Event registrations, Volunteer registrations}. Users can register the events directly from the links in the calendar. For volunteer registrations provide the form you already have in the website for general registrations.

Recommendation #2 : On the donation page, provide information about how a particular donation category helps the park. Additionally, provide a link to a detailed fund usage on the donation checkout page.

Recommendation #3 : On the History page, make the section buttons present on the top of the history page more visually appealing by Increasing their size, add clickable photos, and add a timeline button as a history section that goes to the history timeline page.

Recommendation #4 : Order the posts by date in one column to adhere to the conventional blog format standards and add a clickable archive & keyword filter section on the right side of the page to assist with search and discovery.

Navigation Experience

Users seemed to prefer using the photo links in the body of the home page to navigate around the website instead of the top navigation bar.

Blog by Charlotte Megill

Some users thought a blog post by historian Charlotte Megill might fit better in the history or other section.

History about John Golden

Users were easily missing the history about John Golden on the history page.