The Usability Company provided valuable insight into visitor behaviour when the Department for Trade and Industry redesigned its 12,000 page portal.
As the government agency responsible for promoting business and science and for ensuring fair market competition, the Department for Trade and Industry has a remit that touches on most people’s lives. Its diversity is reflected in the wealth and variety of content on the website, amounting to 12,000 pages of text. These include tip sheets for fledgling businesses on everyday issues like finding a good office location, advice for employees on employment law and work-life balance, and tips for consumers on preventing accidents at home.
The DTI homepage in September 2004 prior to the launch of its redesign
"Our research indicated that people thought there was really good information there - when they could find it," says the DTI’s head of internet and new media Rupert Marsh. "We had loyal customers who were dedicated enough to find the content they wanted. A lot of people visited more than once a week but there were a lot of people who came to the site and never came back again. It might be that they only had one question, found their answer and then left. Anecdotally, we knew a lot of them were getting frustrated and leaving.
"One problem is that we cover such a wide range of stuff," says Marsh. "Nobody – including most of the people who work here – is aware of the total range of what we do. When visitors come to our website, they might know us for one thing and come looking for that. At the moment, they wouldn’t have a way to discover other content we can provide which might be of interest to them. We wanted to do some cross-selling of our content.
The DTI decided to carry out a complete redesign of the website, redeveloping the content management system used to populate it at the same time.
"We wanted to make sure our new site did test out as a usable site and not just some designer’s dream," says Marsh.
The need for independence and cooperation
To meet this objective, the DTI recruited FRESH01 as its design agency and The Usability Company as its independent usability agency.
"This independence is essential," says Marsh. "A lot of companies say they can do both the design and usability work, but having an independent eye really helped. A lot of website design is subjective. People have concrete ideas about websites even though the web hasn’t been around that long. The Usability Company has seen a lot of testing and knows whether something will work or not. Because they’re specialists, you can’t argue with them."
Marsh adds: "There was one example involving accessibility, where the design agency called The Usability Company’s usability consultant Marty Carroll and asked about a rollover button. He was able to say it couldn’t be done in the way suggested but could suggest an alternative. If we hadn’t had an independent view, we would have gone down the wrong alley and would have had to rip up two weeks work and start again later."
Throughout the project, FRESH01 emailed visuals to The Usability Company for feedback and the companies often met up to discuss aspects of the design. Marsh says: "There was a good working relationship between The Usability Company and the design agency and we put money in the budget for phone calls and meetings between them."
"We really did think of it as a partnership," says FRESH01’s managing director Sara Chandler. "The timescales on this project meant we had to work very closely together and be aware of each other’s deadlines and sensitivities."
Card sorting
The website of over 12,000 pages originally had 80 top level categories, which the new design whittled down to 8. To help the transition from a site described by Marsh as ‘a number of microsites stapled together at the homepage level’, The Usability Company arranged a card sorting exercise.
In this stage of the project, multiple groups of participants representing the various audience groups placed cards with the section names written on them in an order they considered logical.
"The card sorting was really useful," says Marsh. "While the usability lab tests were decisive, the card sorting was just one aspect we had to take into consideration when specifying the final structure. There are certain things the DTI needs to have on its homepage for organisational reasons and there will be some topics that people might not be too interested in looking for, which we want to promote."
Usability tests
There were two rounds of usability tests, conducted at The Usability Company’s purpose-built usability lab in London. In both tests, participants were given simple tasks to complete using three prototype website designs. Their progress was watched by Rupert Marsh and representatives from FRESH01 and The Usability Company through one-way glass.
The first test involved 14 participants, drawn from the DTI’s audience of scientists, employers and employees. In the report, these participants were broken down by age group, gender, and their experience using the internet. There were six participants in the second test, which validated changes made following the first test.
Several navigation options were tested, including:
- the separation of ecommerce links as opposed to their integration in the navbar;
- the position of key navigational elements across the top of the page as opposed to down the left hand side; and
- the position of secondary navigation links on the right hand side as opposed to on the left hand side.
"The first round of testing didn’t pick up that many problems," says Marsh. "The process worked. There were some glaring errors with navigation though: it wasn’t clear to people what was going on and there were some problems with the labelling we’d used."
One of the problems related to how the left hand menu expanded. A different colour was used for each level of the menu, but these colours weren’t strongly enough differentiated for users to notice them. The solution was to increase the contrast. "A small tweak made a huge difference," says Marsh.
Being able to see the tests in progress made it easier for the design agency and client to understand how site visitors would use the site, and how their experience could be improved.
One of the three prototype website designs tested in The Usability Company’s usability lab. This design separates the ecommerce links from the main navbar and places them on the right, where they often appear on popular retail websites.
"When you sit there and watch the user, you look at the screen differently," says Marsh. "You take a step back and look at the whole site and think to yourself, it’s obvious he won’t be able to find that link."
"It was the first time we’d watched a usability test," says Chandler. "At the end of the day, we’re not testing a lot of people but you see the same things come up over and over again. We could have gone to one test to validate the process, but we went to them all and encouraged the client to go as well. It meant we could take decisions there and then. The output of the testing is a bound report, but the timescales often dictated that we couldn’t wait for that. Often we’d have solutions planned by the time we left The Usability Company, after talking them through with the usability consultant and the client."
One lesson to emerge from the testing for the DTI was how big a role the content of the webpages plays in helping people navigate the website. The prototypes used dummy content and old content and this made it harder for users to understand the navigation. As a result of this discovery, the DTI is training its content editors on how to make sure content is web-friendly.
The final design was developed incrementally, using information about visitor behaviour gleaned from all of the usability work.
Justifying usability budgets in government
"Usability companies might say you can improve your return on investment, which would be key for a supermarket," says Marsh. "That’s not relevant for government – we don’t make money from our websites. But government departments do have to invest significant sums of money in creating websites. With no direct return on investment to consider, having put the money in, we need to start looking at how many people visit the websites and how they help us to meet our objectives. At the very least, nobody can deny that you should ask users if they can use your site or not."
Although the full redesign project has taken over a year, the project is still a leading example of usability engineering in government websites.
"Other areas of government have been very concerned about accessibility but they haven’t yet made that jump to usability for everyone," says Marsh. "They’ll often run some tests when the design is finished and find massive problems. By building usability in from the start, we’ve achieved a much better result."
Marsh concludes: "I’d definitely recommend The Usability Company. They did a very good job for me."
For more information
If you'd like more information on this case study - or would like to talk about how we can help your business - please call Karl Havard on +44 (0)8450 546502 or email me at .
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