Another HCI Blog

This post is part two of an ongoing series entitled “Research for a Website Redesign.” The first post, Web-based Surveys for Collecting Feedback, identified reasons and strategies for collecting feedback on a website redesign using web-based surveys. This post will brainstorm goals and methods for collecting feedback via the one-on-one interview.

Note: The brainstorming in this post is specifically geared towards a higher-ed departmental website that I’m redesigning this summer. I am interviewing five graduate students because faculty consensus (in my previous experiment with web-based surveys) was that graduate students are a major audience for the site.

Interview Goals

First on the agenda is to develop a list of goals for the interviews. What do I want to know (…or change? …or fix?) that requires (or benefits intrinsically from) an in-person observation and/or dialogue?

Goal 1: Figure out how current graduate students use the website.

Do current grad students even visit the website or is it primarily a recruiting tool and once students arrive, they no longer look to the departmental website for information/news/events? Are they looking/needing information that is hard to find, out of date or simply missing? What other information sources do they use (printed materials, advisers, other students, the university’s graduate school)?

Goal 2: Figure out how prospective graduate students use the website.

When these current graduate students were researching graduate programs, what did they look for? Did the current website meet their needs? What kind of recruiting information was lacking? Are we representing the town/university/school/department accurately?

Goal 3: Streamline current navigation in sections where grad students are a primary audience.

Is the current navigation intuitive? How should it be organized and what words/phrases should be used? Starting from a blank page, how do graduate students find information? (Google vs. university website vs. school website vs. departmental website search vs. departmental website navigation vs. personal bookmarks vs. trial & error vs. memory)

Goal 4: Understand the aesthetic and technical preferences of graduate students.

How do graduate students scan text on a website? Are they comfortable with JavaScript/AJAX features? What kind of content is optimal for short paragraphs vs. bulleted lists vs. lengthy descriptions? What kind of imagery is the most appealing (people/students/faculty vs. research/equipment/facilities vs. informational graphics)? What color palettes do a)Duke; b) engineers; c) researching the environment prefer? Which browser/OS are they most comfortable using?

Interview Methods

I will utilize the following methods in attempting to answer the above questions and report back with which methods yielded the most insight.

Method: Open-ended interview questions.

I will sit with the interviewee and ask qualitative questions about their experience. I’ll take notes in addition to using recording devices for easy recall and future study. I will need to prepare my questions in script-form and practice them before running the test.

Method: Record user response (audio, video, screen capture, eye tracking).

I will video-tape the user with my iSight camera during the interview and any experiments/tasks. I will also run a screen capture program (If they prefer Mac, it’ll be Snapz Pro. If they prefer PC, I’m not sure what I’ll use yet. Suggestions?). I should develop a file naming/participant numbering system so that the screen captures and iSight MOV files are in sync. I’ll position a text file with the user’s name and the date on screen so that it’s captured for easy scanning.

Method: Walkthrough/talkthrough task(s).

I will ask the user to guide me in finding something on the internet. I plan to do this twice, once in a unrelated Google search (to assess how they find information in general) and once or twice in a related website activity (to assess how they find information in context).

Method: Eeny, meeny, miny, moe task(s).

The EMMM tasks are quantitative questions, like “Which one do you like better?” I need a program that delivers a slide (or slides) across monitors, so that I can put an option on each monitor. I wonder if it’s possible to command two slide presentations at once (perhaps one from Pages and one from Powerpoint?) There’s got to be a better way… Synergy could be useful.

Method: Card sorting task(s).

I will use card sorting to get a graduate students’ opinions on website navigation. In the excellent Card sorting: a definitive guide, Maurer and Warfel suggest between 30 and 100 cards. With this in mind, I’ll most likely limit my cards to graduate student specific areas (faculty, research, about, grads).

The point is this: Using the one-on-one interview, I will gain valuable insight and experience that cannot be obtained from web-based surveys. By preparing interview scripts and methods before hand , I’ll be a more capable and unbiased observer/interviewer. In the end, I hope to incorporate intuitive components that are attractive to the graduate student audience into my upcoming website redesign.

Next up for this series…

I will be reporting back with the results of my one-on-one interviews. I hope to have screen captures and user videos to share. I also plan to write about using Google Analytics to help make redesign decisions; creating personas based on analytics, interviews and surveys; and writing usability reports.