Leveraging User Research to Help Clients Make Decisions
While working with a large D.C. think-tank, my team was in charge of planning, designing, and testing a new I.A. for the site.
We started with baseline testing of the existing site tree, and then came up with five main concepts.
Once we had the five concepts, we created trees and tasks using Optimal Treejack.
Recruitment
We recruited about 150 participants to test the trees—roughly 25 people per test. In recruitment, we looked for:
-
United States residents
-
College-educated
-
Ages 21-70
-
Likely readers of articles about international affairs
Results
Concept 5 was the clear winner, surprisingly out-performing other concepts (and, importantly, the baseline) on every metric.
Also, interestingly, the concept proposing a clear "Multimedia" section increased usability for people trying to find content such as videos and podcasts.
Finding a clear winner provided our team with compelling evidence of the direction we should take; it's quite a satisfying result when your team can show exactly why a certain I.A. should be implemented, and we all—client and agency staff alike—were glad to see it.
More Work
When patients search for a doctor, using their ZIP code, is a centerpoint based on a bounding box really the best approach?
How do people know which sports may be most beneficial for their teenagers to play? And how might they customize rankings based on what is important to them or their family members?