Baby’s First Case Study
A usability case-study focused on collegiate websites.
About
For this usability case-study I chose to focus on Rice University in Houston, TX.
Located in an urban environment on a 300-acre tree-lined campus, Rice University seizes its advantageous position to pursue pathbreaking research and create innovative collaboration opportunities that contribute to the betterment of our world.
My first impressions after looking over the Rice website landing page was that it’s outdated. The page is long and clunky. What is clear is that Academics come first and the Arts come second. Athletics don’t play any role on the homepage. School colors are represented in the fonts and general color scheme leaving an overall impression of Blue. The video selected to take up the most important realty on the homepage tells the viewer next to nothing about the university itself or life on campus. There are some minor and major issues throughout the site that could be resolved with some simple updates. The video doesn’t do the job of telling the story of Rice University in a way that is engaging and could definitely do with an upgrade.
User Testing
Jorge’s first impressions of the site were similar to my own. The long scrolling did nothing for the aesthetics of the site nor it’s navigability. The drop down menu is short and clear, but it can appear slightly off on mobile devices making this user want to scroll down where no scrolling was needed. There was an obvious error on the Calendar block that was distracting (appeared on both mobile and desktop site). He did like the logo and had a particular affinity for the small owls on the crest.
TASKS
Find the school’s mascot:
My user assumed from the school crest and a photo of some owls in the landing page video that the school’s mascot was most likely an owl. This common sense approach took 0 clicks. However, he wanted to find definitive information so he navigated first to the drop-down menu, then the athletic page which takes users to a separate website RICEOWLS.COM, which served as further confirmation to his existing theory. It took a further few clicks using the search feature and selecting from a list of articles to reach definitive, written proof that an owl named Sammy is the mascot for Rice University.
Does the school offer language instruction for Arabic:
My user navigated straight to this information with two clicks. Utilizing the search feature he plugged in “Arabic” and selected the first link from the options. Trying to locate this same information without using the search bar is a 6 click task that requires a little bit of guesswork, intuition, and scrolling.
Find the nearest airport:
My user confidently went to the homepage, scrolled to the bottom, where he had seen an address, and tried to click on it. He was flabbergasted that this yielded no results. His expectation was that the address would be a clickable link that would bring the user to a map screen. This flustered and annoyed him. He finally went back to his favorite feature: Search. From here, he learned at a glance that there are two major airports nearby and that the closest is Hobby airport. By clicking on one of the links found on the search page he was able to navigate to a page for visits that attempts to help users find their way to the university.
Pain Points
- Athletics take a back-seat to academics and it’s difficult to find information about the mascot.
- Information about the nearest airport could be found, but the pages dedicated to those directions are not as clear and user-friendly as they could be.
Solutions
The main Pain Points on the website, based on this exercise, have relatively easy solutions that could be incorporated into the existing site with low labor and cost. My solution for the Mascot problem is simple: add an additional slide in the landing page video showing Sammy the Owl at a sporting event. This would give users a sense of the student-life and team-spirit of Rice University without taking away from the academic focus.
My solution for the airport information/directions involves a few steps that, ultimately, make directions easier to access. First, anywhere the school address I listed should become a clickable link that takes users to a map page in either a new tab or a pop-up. Second, I would update the Visit page and make Air/ Car/ Public Transport buttons that would take users to more specific information regarding those transport options including a more user-friendly map pop-up that allows users to select routes from the most common/suggested points.
My focus for this case study was on finding the simplest solutions to the problem. The site could use a facelift and some more thorough user-friendly solutions in the long-run. For now, a few intuitive changes could really improve the feel of the site.
This first case-study was really interesting. Looking at the site with a critical eye and utilizing user-feedback to find shared pain-points and quality solutions to those issues was something I thoroughly enjoyed. It has encouraged me to look beyond aesthetics and to grow more comfortable with identifying the feelings that interacting with a product can have.
