Final case
This exercise consists on reviewing an American university website and analyzing its content in order to improve its pain points. To do so, I met with two different persons and asked them some questions.
The university I chose was the University of Southern California.
Interviewing users
I asked them both the same questions, which were given by the teachers:
Give them seven seconds to get a first impression of the website. Ask them to give you a small phrase or a group of adjectives
Ask them what they think about the navigation of the site
Ask them to find:
The school mascot
If the school offers foreign language instruction for Arabic
The nearest airport to the school
I wrote their answers on my notebook and then organized their responses and conclusions:
The pain points
So I concluded the navigation may seem clear at first sight, but it is truly its main pain point, as both users didn’t know where to begin with when asked to find the info.
I found out that the menu linking to different websites, with completely different organizations, means a lack of consistency for the website.
The menu might seem clear at first, but it’s not well organized, and some buttons don’t seem important when they actually are.
This is the home page of the university, but all we see is a very small menu, and hidden information. The whole main page is crowded with news and articles that can’t provide us with the information we need when entering in a university’s website.
Problem solving and prototype
I chose to give to the website a direct message that said “this is a university”, so I tried to make a very simple main page with two menus, the logo, a picture of the campus and the name of the university.
The first menu should link to each internal online campus for staff, students, alumni and parents.
I reorganized the website’s content, prioritizing and including in the second menu what I considered the most important categories and subcategories.
I put a news category which should open a news page with this kind of disposition, so all the images and info that are not so related with the main content don’t disturb:
As you scroll down the main site, more buttons which link to other important pages related to life at university appear.
And finally another section with more basic info about contact appears:
I found this exercise very challenging and interesting. At first I didn’t know where to begin with, but I followed the steps one by one and organized all the information and ideas I had and it all seemed to work out by its own!
