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ICC Website Usability Evaluation

Information Architecture, Web Development

ICC Website Usability Evaluation
Student Marketing Intern, October 2011 to April 2012
Inter-Cooperative Council at University of Michigan (ICC), Ann Arbor, MI, USA
ICC is a student owned, student run and administered non-profit organization, which is devoted to providing affordable houses for students in Ann Arbor area. Their website, icc.coop, serves as a major information portal. There are four sections on the website: Join (for prospective members), Learn (introducing ICC), Live (for current members), and Remember (for alumni). The website has hosted almost all information needed for prospective members, current residents and staff. Nevertheless, despite the importance the website plays in promoting ICC, ICC doesn’t own feedback from users for its website since its launch in 2003.

At the request and supervision of Member Services Director and Web Administrator of Inter-Cooperative Council (ICC), we conducted this usability test for ICC’s current website since October 2011. This study was to seek patterns in first-time visitors’ information seeking behaviors, as well as find usability issues at ICC website. We recruited four users to test the website based on the scenario we had wrote with the ICC web team. Participants were then required to fill out a questionnaire to test their learning outcome.

In our study, we found that participants have different information seeking patterns; they would use other website such as Google Maps to help them get information. The Houses page and the FAQ page are two heavy visited pages. Our study shows that participants paid attention only to information related to their own application and ignore other pages such as “About ICC”, yet the majority of the first-time visitors are able to gain general understanding of ICC either by common sense or from information provided at pages they’d visited. When they could not or did not want to find information by their own, participants usually chose to ask the house president by email.

Our study indicates that there are many usability issues at ICC website that may affect first-visitors’ experience. Participants had experienced mediate level of struggles in completing the tasks we gave them, which often accompanied by confusion and misinterpretation. Languages and labels may be too hard to understand especially for international students whose native language is not English. The website is text-heavy, which may cause difficulty in finding useful information quickly. In addition, participants pointed out inconsistency in navigation system and task workflow. In the end, the website’s interface design has potential to be improved.

Based on our study, we generate several recommendations that include: (1) seek user experience professionals’ advices when redesign the website, and (2) integrate usability test and user experience evaluation into the website redesign cycle.
Homepage of ICC (When We Started Our Usability Test Evaluation).

This was the first time that ICC runs a usability test to its website. We were evaluating the "Join" section at this time.
The Usability Scenario We Had Assigned to Each Participant

Jun and I worked with the Director of Member Services and the Web Administrator to design the scenario. The participant was asked to play as a prospective student of University of Michigan who needed housing that was pet-friendly and provided vegan food. We expected the study would reveal (1) as many usability issues as possible, and (2) the information seeking patterns of first-time visitors.
Part of the Questionnaire

After the interaction with the website was over, we asked our participant to fill out a questionnaire to test their learning outcome (how much they know about ICC, and whether they got correct information).
Part of Our Observation Notes
We evaluated the success rate as well as the error rate of each participant on each task. The success rate, as shown at the Table 2, indicated whether a participant had successfully completed a given task (S for success, F for fail, and HS stands for Half-Success, which means that the participant found the information but not at the ICC website). We further evaluated how hard a participant felt to complete a given task by assigning an error rating from 0 (no error) to 4 (severe errors).
"Houses" Page of ICC Website

It was one of two pages that our participants had visited most.
Amenities Chart of ICC Website

In our study we found that all participants whose native language is not English could not understand what "Amenities Chart" means, and therefore could not complete the second task we assigned to them (find out whether a house is pet friendly or not, and find whether it offers vegan food). This finding was included in our report under "Language and labels may cause misapprehensions".
Some Drop-down Menus at Amenities Chart

For participants who did visited the Amenities Chart page, they pointed out that the options here were confusing. For example, what does "All" mean while there is another option says "Available" (left part of the picture)? For participants, the two choices mean the same thing, but "All" actually stands for "Available+Not Available". We also included this finding under "Language and labels may cause misapprehensions".