USUSA Clubs Website
User Testing and Redesign

BACKGROUND 

 

An incoming freshman comes to college with an unmatched level of excitement. They are excited to join every intramural team, meet new friends, take all kinds of classes, learn how to do laundry, and join a club (or five). They hear that there is a chess club, a swing dancing club, an improv club, an investment club, and many, many more. How will they choose just one? They search through the Utah State University website for these clubs for what feels like hours before feeling totally defeated. If they’re lucky, they’ll find a few broken links to club pages and maybe some contact information that is out of date. Afterwards, they give up and go on their way. When they leave college, they walk away with a diploma, but no sense of community or sense of belonging to the Aggie Family.

 

During our first meeting with the leadership of Utah State University Student Association’s (USUSA) clubs, we learned why a clubs website redesign was necessary. To begin, at Utah State University, there has not been a well-defined centralized presence for the management and recruiting for USU sponsored/approved clubs for some time. The two primary groups that have been affected by this deficiency are first, the staff and students who operate the USUSA clubs, and second the USU students who are looking for, or belong to, a club.

USUSA has also been concerned with the level of engagement from club members and presidencies. They’ve hoped to create a space that promotes greater ownership and participation, by including clubs in the process of updating and operating their respective club pages. 

Another issue currently faced by USUSA is being able to host important documents and links, such as the USUSA Club Handbook. The visual impact of the website has also been noted to be a top priority for USUSA. During our first meeting, the client also expressed the problem of not having any interactive features on the website for interested students, including being able to request more information, be able to join a club, or view a current calendar of club events.

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GOALS

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Our goals with the designing of a club portal were to:

• Provide a centralized location for all USUSA-sponsored clubs.

  • This includes individual club pages, rosters, events, etc.

• Promote engagement of club members by facilitating page maintenance for their respective organizations.

• Host and centralize important resources and links for club use.

• Provide a centralized location that will allow as a student to find & join a club, as well as view club information and calendared events.

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DESIGN PROCESS

 

For our design process, we followed the four steps:

Information Architecture, Wireframe/Mockup, Prototype, and User Testing throughout the process. We diverged for each of these steps, then converged weekly to make final decisions regarding how to proceed.

 

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

 

The theme of our Information Architecture was “simplicity”. Through listening to the concerns of USUSA leadership, we learned that there is often confusion on how to join or start a club, and where to find resources once they are a member of a club or a club leader. The client gave us a simple hand-drawn IA during our first meeting, and it closely resembled the Hub-and-Spoke model (Satanek, 2012). This greatly influenced our plans moving forward. We planned to have a main landing page off of the USUSA website, then branch out to different resources from there. To build our IA’s, we used LucidChart, as well as drawing them by hand.

 

WIREFRAME/MOCKUP

 

After converging on a final IA, our team diverged to explore wireframe options. To create the wireframes, our group used Adobe XD, while also using hand-drawn examples to quickly get ideas down on paper. See Again, as a group, our focus was simplicity and functionality for both students and club leaders. However, we all agreed that with increased functionality (as desired by USUSA leadership), there would need to be a keen focus on maintaining simplicity and usability. To help with this, our final wireframe was influenced by our user testing.

 

PROTOTYPE

 

Designing our final prototype allowed our team to converge and synthesize the suggestions, feedback, and results from our user tests and meetings with USUSA leadership. In the following section, you will see how our user testing influenced the design of the final prototype. To summarize, our prototype serves as an example of a centralized location for USUSA clubs, both for interested students and club leaders. Focusing on functionality, we included the concepts of a newly designed clubs list page that students can use to quickly learn more about clubs, or click to new pages for further detail and interaction. For club leaders, we made sure to give each club a hub for their events, files, and communication. As a late addition, we included the suggestions of social media icons at the recommendation of USUSA leadership. Overall, USUSA leadership was very happy with the prototype.

 

The following link will lead to the finished prototype, created in Adobe XD.

 

https://xd.adobe.com/view/cbe2df85-31d0-4cd0-5a82-dc65588e3a56-bdd3/?fullscreen

 

USER TESTING

 

In order to get the most feedback possible at each stage of our process, we decided to diverge in our user testing responsibilities to gain information from students at different stages of our design process. Our intentions were to use these results in order to be iterative and make constant improvements to our mockups and prototypes. By testing at each iteration, we hoped to detect and fix the things that confuse or frustrate the users, and believe we were successful.

 

To begin, our team focused on participatory design in our team’s first set of user tests. Since the USUSA Clubs website is going to be built from the ground up, we opted to use a form of participatory design in order to help ideate potential design preferences that users would find easy to use. Participatory design is very useful when implemented in the early stages of development and ideation in order to help determine the scope of the project. Additionally, we have opted to follow the rationale of designing for people, rather than at people, which makes participatory design fit with this objective. Without having a clear idea as to how we should proceed in order to deliver the best format for the website to our core users, we created an instrument and instructions in order to receive tacit feedback from our participants in order to determine what to design and develop.

 

Our team was able to meet with four students and allow them to work with physical blank copies of the webpage, with a list of features and instructions to write or draw in how they would like the webpage to be organized. Our team found that most students wanted the main links to be in the top-left of the page, with the clubs calendar on the right. This first set of testing greatly influenced our initial wireframes. 

 

The subsequent user test was then performed by our team. We interviewed various current students at USU to gain insight as to how students are (if at all) using the current Clubs website. In general, students were not aware that the Clubs website even existed or how to get there. Some students had heard of “a clubs link on the myusu portal” but could not even locate the link once on the portal page. Some students, once on the clubs website, were unsure of how to navigate the website.

 

Next, our team conducted interviews using the current Clubs website and an early prototype of the new website. Our goals were to explore aesthetic opinions and usability issues with both websites in order to identify portions of the site that might not make sense. In short, our team found that although the original website could be navigated, half the students interviewed struggled to find the correct initial links to find the main club list. On the new prototype, students appreciated the new easy-to-understand layout, and commented on how link titles should be easily identifiable.

 

Last, our team conducted moderated usability testing on club presidents with a final prototype of the new website. Moderated usability testing was useful in not only seeing the way they interacted with the prototype, but also being able to answer their questions and reply to their feedback. While most of the feedback was positive and communicated excitement for the new website, a few suggestions were given. Most of the feedback was focused on features they would like to see added, including social media buttons and a place to submit design requests. Some features were also hard to find, so they were moved to the top of the page.

 

IMPLEMENTATION

 

In order to move forward with our design, the first step was to receive feedback on our prototype both from the client as well as one last round of usability testing on the finished website. This ensured our design goals had been achieved.

 

Next, we involved campus IT in implementing the design. As part of the limitations our team was faced with, this website could only be built using OU Campus, the current host of the USUSA website. We delivered the information architecture and final prototype to IT, along with explaining our intent to give user access to club leadership. USUSA has a dedicated webmaster who assisted in the implementation and subsequent upkeep of the core pages. Clubs were made responsible to update their own pages which is a stipulation for their continued involvement in the USUSA Clubs program.

 

Last, proposed that USUSA create a marketing campaign to raise awareness of the new club website and club resources. In our user testing of the old website, we found that many students could not only not navigate the old site, but couldn’t find it to begin with. We suggested that a clear link is placed on the MyUSU page, as well as other major university landing pages. 

 

With the implementation of this new website, clubs and students alike have the resources they need in order to be successful. Going back to our original goals for this website:

 

1.  We have been able to provide a centralized location for all USUSA sponsored clubs by giving each club their own website. On their pages, they are be able to post things like updates to their club, upcoming events, and meeting times.

2. Clubs are now be able to promote the engagement of club members by having the ability to update their page often and with ease. By adding an “Update my club page” feature on the website, there is no longer a question that club presidents can and should update their page often.

3. By the addition of the leadership resources page, clubs are be able to find important resources they need to succeed. Frequently asked questions are featured on this page, along with the information they should be accessing often.

4. Students can now join clubs effortlessly, with several places easily labeled “Join a Club”. These forms are given to club presidents with everything they need to know about contacting their new member and keeping them in the loop with updates.