UWB Clubs Site
Role: UX Research, UX Design, UI Design
Skills: Qualitative Analysis, Wireframing, Prototyping, Usability Tests
Duration: January - March 2022
Project Type: CSS 478 User Research (Usability and User-Centered Design)
Overview
For this usability and user-centered design project, our team focused on redesigning the current UWB (University of Washington Bothell) Clubs site to improve user experience. The improvement of our design included re-designing the club access pages, as well as resources and other contributions to the club site.
Our intention was to conduct rapid user research on the current UWB Club site, as well as competitor sites to understand user goals and interests. We also worked closely with current and prospective UWB students to gather insights on their difficulties, needs, and interests in relation to accessing club information and potentially joining or creating new clubs.
Our research and redesign efforts were aimed at providing a stronger information architecture that would improve the user's experience and interaction with the site.
Goals
​Focus on how usability methods could be incorporated into the system design lifecycle with using the research techniques include user survey, heuristic evaluation, task analysis and experimental testing. Our team worked on the Clubs page
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To help school understand how current and prospective students utilize and access club resources to join and create clubs.
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To understand current difficulties with club creation and joining processes to improve UWB student club participation.
UWB strategic objectives for redesigning website are the following
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User friendly UX and UI.
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Unified look and feel.
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Excellent, interactive, and up-to-date contents.
Try Our Deliverables
Process
We conducted 6 rounds of usability testing on current students, utilizing a remote methodology in which we conducted the testing over online Zoom sessions with our newly built prototype.
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Including usability testing of the newly developed UWB Clubs site, we conducted usability testing on the previous site. All of our research for this project and development of our prototype was conducted throughout the Winter 2022 quarter, which consists of 10 weeks.
Key Research Activities
1. Survey
conducted 5 times with the current website
2. Micro Usability Study
conducted 7 times with the current website
3. Card Sorting
conducted 7 times based on the previous survey and study
4. Prototyping
5. Remote Usability Test
conducted 7 times with our prototype
Personas
Through digital ethnography and based on the given interview data of our target users, we created 2 primary personas (a current student and a prospective student) with the following processes.
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Brainstorming
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Interviewing potential users
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Finalizing list of users
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Creating primary personas
User Journey Map
Based on the previous user research, our team created a customer journey map of Julia Smith.
Research Questions & Answers
We conducted 5 surveys and 7 micro usability studies to explore the user goals, pain points and habits with a focus on user-centered design.
For the micro usability study, we asked the participants to do four tasks on the current website:​
1. Locate Clubs of Interest
2. Join a New Club
3. Reach Out to the Club Council Regarding Questions
4. Search for Upcoming Club Events
Some of the highlights from our interviews are...
01.
What are users using club information and clubs for?
Mostly to explore what clubs are available.
Some students also try to find events for networking.
02.
How many clubs do students sign up for on average?
0.86 per person on the average.
About half of the students did not express interest in participating in any clubs due to work or academic commitments.
03.
How long does it take to sign up for a club?
7-20 mins.
If a student wants to join a club, they must go to another Student Portal site called Presence. There is a limit to the number of clubs that can be displayed on each page on Presence, so it can be very time consuming to see what clubs are available.
Even if the user already knows which clubs they want to join, the process of navigating from the clubs page to Presence can be confusing if they are not familiar with the site.
Prioritized List of Issues
The current UWB Club page has a couple of issues that can be separated into different categories:
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The visual display on the UWB main clubs site and on Presence
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The UWB site itself contains many navigational issues
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Presence has performance issues
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Presence has issues with club information for club officers and members
For example...
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Home Page
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The navigation bar that is placed on the left hand side of the page is really hard for users to see at first.
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There is also a lack of space being used for a bigger browser (desktop or laptop device) since it is basically using only the middle of the screen to display information and leaves the left and right hand sides completely empty.
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The overall image quality of the pictures and background design is rough and looks out-dated.
Presence
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There is a lack of direction towards presence which is where the club directory and club event information is hosted. Users need to go to 'Club Resources' to find a link to Presence, which does not help that the site itself is not known about by many students in the first place.
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When the user would attempt to go to Presence, sometimes the site would either take an unnecessary amount of time to load or would be stuck in the loading page.
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If the users do not open Presence on their own another browser tab, they have to manually find their way back or repeatedly pressing the back page button on the browser since the site has no button to renavigate the user back to the UWB club pages.
The tables below summarize all of the problems with each of the sites listed here and how severe the problems are.
Card Sorting
We conducted card sorting exercises to create the information architecture based on our two personas.
We found the different main pages of the site that we would have...
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Homepage
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Join a Club (Removed the need for Presence)
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Create a Club
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Manage Clubs (For club officers and members)
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Club Information
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Event Calendar
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Help
Here is our information architecture diagram:
Remote Usability Test
After completing our initial prototype, we conducted 7 tests with three different scenarios for our two personas.​
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Some of the feedback and our findings are...
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Site design is cleaner, more professional, and user-friendly compared to the current UWB site
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Event calendar that provides important dates and upcoming events for each clubs is useful
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No hassle of loading up and using Presence
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Took time to navigate the new design at first
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Not too much filtering/searching options for various sections of the site
→Filtering is essential as it would allow for more targeted searching to find information needed.
Outcomes
Scenario1:
The prospective student Julia Smith wants to browse club events occurring this month and find some potential events to attend.
Scenario2:
The current student Brad Smith is a member of the Green Team Club. He wants to see how many members are in his club. He also wants to know what club media channels are available.
Takeaways / Next Steps
As we continue our research, several potential next steps have emerged. These steps will help us to better understand the needs and preferences of those at UWB and design more effective solutions.
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AI Quiz
One idea is to develop an AI-generated quiz to help students select clubs based on their interests. The quiz will ask questions about the user's interests and use the responses to suggest a selection of clubs that align with their needs. This would make it easier for students at UWB to find clubs that align with their passions.
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All-in-One Site
Another step we're considering is centralizing communication between club officers and members on the UWB club website. If there was some sort of chat option where non-club members could reach out to the club officers and get information without having to join their Discord or contact them on Instagram, it would make it easier for questions to be answered. This would streamline communication and eliminate the need for students to use external platforms like Discord or Instagram to stay in touch. Additionally, it would provide a more direct way for not only students, but also parents or professors to reach out to club officers for information.
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More Research, Prototyping, and Testing
We're also considering ways to improve the interactive aspect of our prototype design to gain deeper insights from users. This may involve conducting further research and surveying or interviewing users to identify areas for improvement. Conducting more research and making the prototype intractable to see our pain points (other than just intractability) will help to determine other issues with the prototype.
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