Summary
AnnArbor.com is a local news website in the Washtenaw County area of Michigan. My team was tasked with evaluating the usability of a typical AnnArbor.com article page. This was accomplished by our efforts in designing an interaction map (as seen above), conducting user interviews, creating personas and scenarios, completing a competitive analysis, evaluating heuristics, distributing surveys, and completing user tests.
Audience Analysis
Our AnnArbor.com stakeholders wanted to focus on the large college demographic abundantly found within Washtenaw County, Michigan. With a focus on this type of user, our team interviewed a total of 7 individuals with the aim of creating user personas and scenarios. We were able to create a primary, secondary and anti persona out of our results.
Evaluating the competition
One of the best ways of evaluating a service is by taking a look at its competitors. By looking at a sampling of the competition, I was able to identify many of the strengths and weakness faced by AnnArbor.com
I compiled a list of possible competitors and indirect competitors that could offer design ideas to improve the website. From this list, we chose a handful of sites to use for comparison. I pooled the findings from my team members and created a comparison matrix for easy readability (see image below).
We found that there was plenty of room for improvement with regard to a recommender system, the article layout, advertisement placement and the behavior of the comments section.
User Testing
Our usability test had three main goals:
- Find the potential user’s natural behavior and expectations on an article page of a news website.
- Discover the usability of the different features (commenting, sharing, etc.) on the article page
- Record the user’s preference in a comparison between a newly designed, soon to be released, article page and the site’s current version.
Additionally, I designed a memory task where the participants were given a sheet of paper with the same proportions of an article page, as well as a small stack of Post-it notes with labels of the various site elements like “Ad,” or “headline.” The participants had to arrange these Post-It notes on the blank sheet from memory. This task was designed to assess the lasting effect of the site’s contents on the memory of the users. Spoiler alert, participants did not fare well with this task.
Drumroll... Results!
Our team and user research found that most users were unhappy with some of the aspects of the article page layouts as they tend to make for a very long scrollable page. Participants also took issue with some of the large ads that were placed right above the fold, making it difficult for them to reach their desired content. For both of these issues, we recommended a multi column grid layout to ease with the space issue with the request to consider a side placement for ads rather than placing them above the fold.
The comments section did not take a “lazy load” approach, meaning it was fully loaded on the page and contributed to a slow loading and increasingly long web page.
Surprisingly, most participants we tested wanted the local news site to provide more information on local events. This finding came a bit surprising as most of our interview participants identified that they received their news and event information through their social media channels.