Results of Website Testing

Well that about sums up all the work that i did for the User Testing of the Exeter University websites. showing my preliminary mockups to my volunteers actually led to some really positive feedback! they felt that the new design made it much easier to grab the data they wanted, and removed some of the 'clutter' from the old design.

A concise record of all this will be available in the next few days in the form of a detailed report!

Oliver

New Design Specifications - Whats Available

New 'Whats Available' design! although i wrote a load of twaddle on the contents section of this whats happening bit, you can see how it can be laid out. by clicking on the buttons, you can select what subjects you want to compare.

New Design Mockup - Search Bar

Just a quick mockup to show how i see a predictive suggestion search toolbar working for the Exeter website.


Edit - I know that the main menu is the original style one, but im only trying to show the new search bar approach.

New Design Mockup - Main Menu

The new proposed Main Menu layout. Note that the menu in the actual website would be smaller font and in a similar theme to the ones used through out the site.

Whats next and what did i surmise from testing

Right well thats it for tonight. what i am planning on doing though is some basic photoshop mockups to show how the website would look with my proposed changes.

Overall, the testing went really well! each of my users ran into some kind of problem at some point, and that tells you that there is some serious Usability issues with the website. the key problems that were identified were:

• Ineffective search engine
• Broken Links
• Non linked academic departments to the subjects/courses in question
• Misleading sections titles (such as Money Matters)

Hopefully my suggestions, if implemented, would improve several of these problems. i should have the sites mock up interfaces done in the next couple of days!

New Design Specifications - Student Life

After the trouble my usability testers suffered in trying to find the various acccomodation, and sports activites available to studens, it seemed the best way to solve this would be to amalgamate all these sections under one roof, student life.


Student Life now will have a 'Whats Available' section, looking at what facilities and activities are available at the different campuses, and showing them side by side so you can easily compare each site. the design i have produced allows you to look at individual sections of the student life side by side, or select multiple areas by clicking on the tabs on the left.

New Design Specifications - Search Bar

The other main area that caused problems was the low effectiveness of the current websites search bar. my proposed change is to incorporate a new search technology, using predictive input to offer suggestions to the users as they type in their search criteria.

for example, beginning to type 'English', would begin to bring up search suggestions such as 'English Entry Requirements, English Language, English Literature, English Department'.

It allows users to once more, quickly navigate to where they need to get to, and prehaps clarify what it is they are looking for.