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.

Three IA trees graphically represented, in an abstract form: Baseline, Concept 1, and Concept 5 (Concepts 2-4 omitted)
Variations in the I.A., as expressed in site trees to test.

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:

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.

Chart showing metrics from three of the tree tests, highlighting that all metrics on Concept 5 pointed toward its superiority.
After testing the five concepts and the baseline, we found that Concept 5 helped users find information in places they expected to find it. (Concepts 2-4 omitted for relevance, as they performed similarly to each other.)

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

Creating a better ZIP code search for patients

When patients search for a doctor, using their ZIP code, is a centerpoint based on a bounding box really the best approach?

Helping parents and teens evaluate sports for their children

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?