Case Study
Making gov’t web pages more usable
Summary
Opportunity
The City of Saint Paul is seeking to redesign the web pages on its site that relate to garbage and recycling. As part of this process, they need to understand how people perceive the usability of the current pages.
Research Insights
Following a heuristic analysis and usability testing, researchers found several problems with the current site, including issues relating to its information architecture and writing/terminology.
Solution
I recommended some changes that the City could address in the shorter term, including adopting user-centric naming on its pages. In addition, I recommended some ideas for making the visual design simpler and more user friendly.
Opportunity for an improved design
Saint Paul, Minnesota, is a capital city with a population of approximately 300,000 residents. Its municipal government oversees the management of garbage and recycling via the Solid Waste division of its Public Works department.
Internal stakeholders are considering strategic changes to this web page content so it better aligns with users’ mental models, and subsequently provides them with a better experience.
The stakeholders hope these improvements will lead to more user engagement as it relates to solid waste, and that this will subsequently improve trust between the city government and the city’s residents, business owners, and other user groups.
The people behind the redesign effort requested outside research assistance to investigate how people tend to navigate the current garbage & recycling sections of the website. They also sought help in understanding users’ general experiences with the current design.
My role & collaborations
I was part of the outside UX research team that performed these investigations. The five of us collaborated by performing independent heuristic analyses on the solid waste web pages, wrote separate reports of our findings, and shared the results. We identified several issues.
We also developed, collectively, a detailed plan to further evaluate the usability of the solid waste pages.
With recruitment assistance from a senior researcher (from outside the team), we interviewed a total of 10 people, all of whom met specific criteria provided by the city, e.g., apartment dwellers, hobbyists who generate waste, etc.
During these sessions, we took turns acting as either a facilitator or notetaker. After the team synthesized the results of these interviews, I used this synthesis to write a report of findings and recommendations.
Heuristic analysis
My independent heuristic analysis involved selecting a four of the top tasks provided by the city, and then trying to achieve them on the current website. While doing this, I looked for common usability issues.
I used Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics as the basis of my work, and I used a common rating system (also attributed to Neilsen) to estimate and communicate the severity of each problem. Among the four tasks that I performed, I found seven issues that — in my opinion — deserved a severity rating of either 2 (”minor”) or 3 (”major”).
I generated a report of my heuristic analysis findings, which included screenshots of specific examples and a summary of the key challenges facing users of the current site.
Usability evaluation
The evaluation plan — developed by the team — prepared us for our remote, moderated testing sessions, most of which would occur over the course of one day. The bulk of this plan contained a script that would allow us to engage each participant in a nearly-identical way. We asked each user to perform three tasks — four, if time allowed — that were adapted and derived from a larger set of top tasks given to us by the client.
Following these interviews, we gathered our notes, and we wrote down each small observation or interesting quote on a small “sticky,” which were then added to a whiteboard. Some of our source notes were written by us during the session in a Google Doc, and some of these notes were taken from a software tool (Otter.ai) that generates a full transcription of each session and an AI-powered summary. The whiteboard and stickies were also software-based (FigJam).
Using this whiteboard and the Otter tool, I synthesized this information to identify a number of themes. My main takeaway was that all of the participants felt confused or lost at some point while trying to complete a task. This often stemmed from issues with the site’s information architecture (IA) or its language/content.
I wrote a second report of findings and recommendations, this one focusing primarily on the outcomes of the usability sessions. I described the IA and language issues as my two top concerns, offering a collection quotes from the users as evidence supporting this idea.
My proposed solutions
After noting that IA and language/content are “an extensive pair of topics that cannot be fully addressed” in my report, I did propose two solutions that I thought the City could address in the shorter term. Each solution was an effort to concurrently impact my “two top concerns.”
Specifically, I recommended that they adopt user-centric naming on its pages. In addition, I recommended some ideas for making the visual design simpler and more user friendly.
For full details, see the PDF of the Findings & Recommendations Report. This document also includes a full copy (in an appendix) of the preceding report describing my heuristic analysis.
