Showing posts with label usability study. Show all posts
Showing posts with label usability study. Show all posts

Monday, February 2, 2015

Counting on our Website

by Cally Whiteside, web design and usability specialist, Ecology communications

We know we count on our website to share information about the work we’re doing. But we'd like to know more about what our web visitors are counting on. So we're conducting a usability study this week. One part of the testing is happening on the website itself, and you we hope you participated!

Online usability testing

If you visited our website recently, you probably noticed a pop-up message that asked for your help. We used a web tool called “Loop11” that asks volunteers to complete a set of 7 tasks using our website. The information we gathered will give us a better picture of how well our navigation, content and site design work for our visitors.

The quiz was on the site for approximately one week. We also conducted in-person testing so we could observe how our visitors use our site and see where we can improve it.

Our website comes of age!

Our website will turn 21 this year! It was first launched in August of 1994. At that time our entire web fit on a single floppy disk. (Remember floppy disks?) It’s grown considerably since then. We now have over 11,000 files. It’s closer to 40,000 if you count PDF files. That's a lot of information!

In 2014 our website was visited nearly 7 million times. We averaged about 19,000 visits per day. That’s a lot of visitors! And we'd like them to be busy, successful visitors; definitely not frustrated visitors. If you count yourself as a user of our website, we'd appreciate your participation in our online testing. Help us improve our web.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Putting our best face forward – we’re going to improve our website!

by Cally Whiteside, web designer, Communication & Education

Help us improve!

If you're interested in sharing feedback on your experiences with our website, please take our survey here.
When you look at Ecology, what do you see? Chances are you see our website.

On any given day, our website gets over 15,000 visits. That quickly adds up to over half a million visits in a month! Imagine if we had that many people coming through our front door. What would we do differently?

We want to know: Who’s visiting our site? Are you finding what you need? What do you need? Are you satisfied when you’re done? We’re going to find out by asking.

Usability study of our website

We’ve begun the process of evaluating our public-facing website with User Centered Design (UCD). The UCD process reveals what works well, what doesn’t and show’s how a website can be improved.

Who uses our site?

We already have a good idea of how our web serves our visitors. We know what pages are most visited and what words and phrases are searched on. We also collect feedback comments from visitors using Survey monkey. But we need a better understanding of our web visitors needs.

Tell us what you do!

Today we’re launching an extended survey to learn more. The online survey can be accessed from the “Help us improve” link that’s visible on most of our web pages. The information we gather will help us develop a accurate testing plan and to recruit actual users to participate in our baseline study.

You can learn more about user centered design at Usability.gov.