Work

Website design for ServDes 2020

Year: 2020

Group project:

Lee Lee Wong and Mavis Lau

Research

In the beginning of our project, we started with a review of other students’ reports to better understand the participants and stakeholders of ServDes2020. One of the key concerns that we concluded are the engagement of ServDes2020, especially if it were to be held in an online format. Many of the interviewees responded that face-to-face engagement is highly regarded for idea generation and communication. Technical issues might be an obstacle for some participants as well.

In terms of the characteristics of the audience, the interviewed ServDes community are generally optimistic and outgoing. They are also open to different kinds of experiences.

Taking note of an online conference format, some interviewees suggested an online platform or virtual mailbox for them to express themselves or offer feedback for further improvement of the website. A rating system was also suggested to vote for activities they enjoyed the most in ServDes2020.

Goals and objectives

These values helped us to build a set of goals to optimize the website for the ServDes2020 participants. These goals formed the basis of planning and execution of our project. The goals and the relevant intentions include:

To create a guideline for the website for reduced confusion in further updates of the website.
To optimize image on the website while maintaining image quality for reducing site loading time.
To add alt text or rename images for visitors who use screen readers or with slow internet.
To enhance mobile user experience and accessibility as people spent most of their internet browsing time on mobile devices.
To revise content structure to generate a better content depth and broadness.

User archetype

The use of user archetype was suggested by our mentor after creating the personas to summarise the characteristics of the interviewees. We have observed three different user archetypes amongst our personas, namely bold adventurers, enthusiastic advocates and technologically-advanced experimenters.

Bold adventurers consist of creative persons who are willing to take risks, experimental and actively taking in new knowledge to improve themselves. However, they are easily frustrated when they cannot continue building new ideas or develop themselves in different aspects.

Enthusiastic advocates are a group of people who are more idealistic, quiet and less radical. However, they are willing to accept new ideas or changes if conditions are met.

Technologically-advanced experimenters are a relatively younger demographic with a more advanced technological background and more open to new experiences. However, they are critical to the experiences that they encountered.

Issues and recommendations for ServDes 2020 website

Building from the user experiences and the user archetypes, we have jotted a list of issues and prioritised them with a chart based on user value and effort by organization. A major part of our work is to revise the content hierarchy and information architecture of the website. Other aspects include mobile usability, website guideline and user experience.

These aspects of work include segmenting information for better readability, reducing information clutter, simplifying the web pages, and clarifying overlapping text and backgrounds.

The recommendations include:

Adding illustrations and images to provide more visually appealing content
Reducing the size of the first section other than the home page for improved scrolling experience
Using single colored background behind the text for better readability
Including a footer to enhance navigation and reduce size of Google Maps
Building content hierarchy to segment different sections of information
Replacing text by graph and image
Including a privacy statement on the website for the data collected by the Wix platform and possible future integration of Google Analytics
Revise mobile website usability

From our assessment of time availability, we have prioritised revising website structure to improve user experience and accessibility of the website.

Prototyping

With a holistic website guideline, we began the process of prototyping. As two of our team members created a website design before the guideline was finished, we took inspiration from their design and revised the website according to the guideline.

The prototype website was built based on the existing ServDes2020 website on the Wix platform. The changes we have successfully done in the time of this assignment include changes to the first section on most pages, rebuilding of information and ad- dition of anchor links to enhance information searching on the website, replacement of website background and addition of text box to reduce the overlapping of text and graphics and improve reading of text, building of a footer and a total revamp of the mobile pages.

Some of the recommendations were not included in this prototype, including a privacy policy and the rewriting of content, as advised by our mentor on legal grounds and the approval required by the committee.

Usability test

After the building of a prototype, we moved onto the user testing stage to trial if our new website was able to solve or reduce problems found in the existing website. We were also looking to discover accessibility, usability, navigation and user experience issues for new elements of the website.

When looking for the testing subjects, we selected our users based on the three user archetypes that were created at the start of this project. We have developed three versions of tests to cover the changes we have made on different pages. Depending on the users’ location and availability, we have performed our user testing through face-to-face meetings and Zoom. User testing over Zoom asked users to share their viewing screen to the researchers while researchers directly observe user behaviour for face-to-face testing.

The users would follow the procedure that we have set beforehand to go through our prototype stage. The users would be using their own devices for the testing in order to try and discover issues on different agents. The test also included a feedback section for users to offer suggestions and recommendations for improvement. The testing time for each user would be 15-20 minutes.

Result

The results from user testing were optimistic as most tasks received a pass. Yet, one of the tasks recorded “pass with difficulty” on the notion of an not-well-defined menu. The 9 task, which asked the user to “learn more about sending a mail in Melbourne”, had the user confused on which page to go for.

The feedback from the users included a revision of website menu structure to better illustrate contents below each menu tab, enlargement of text embedded in images, adjustment of spacing and better use of punctuations.

We have made changes to the spacing adjustments after user testing. Yet, we lacked time to restructure the menu while the punctuation would require approval from the ServDes committee. The enlargement of text in images was also not addressed as the images in question was from another group that we collaborated with

Feedback

Over the course of our project, we have received valuable feedback from various stakeholders. Some of the issues were addressed in various stages of the project while some others would require aids or approval from other parties.

Firstly, our mentor, Nicholas Shu, has mentioned reducing the use of different font size and weight when developing the guideline. Therefore, we only had three styles which shared the same font and only two different font weights.

Before the user testing stage, we have asked Nicholas to briefly go through the proto- type when he found issues with our anchor menu overlapping paragraph text. After an unsuccessful trail in rescaling the anchor menu, we have decided to place anchor links to the top of the page and include a back to top button.

Nicholas also offered insights for us during the user testing stage in building a scenario for the users to go through the website as a journey but not as individual events.

Other ServDes2020 committee members have also mentioned the cultural sensitivity on the illustrations and website accessibility to people with impairments. While we have added cultural sensitivity guidelines, website accessibility was not tested due to a lack of suitable testing subject.

Tanja from the ServDes202 committee has suggested the use of No Coffee Simulator to better understand users with visual impairments. We have gone through each page of our prototype with the simulators to ensure the visual accessibility of the website. We have also reduced the tasks in our user testing from her recommendations.