the research

quanatative audit

The Quantitative Audit is a list of different links on a website and how they all link together. This audit’s goal was to see what links linked were and if there were any broken links, repetitive links, or anything that would confuse users. When making this audit of the Wisconsin Bike Federation, I found there were hidden links. Hidden links mean that there are links to a bunch of different pages within paragraphs of text. There are repetitive links throughout the webpage. On the homepage alone, there were at least four clickable items linked to a membership page. The website talks about how the community has helped with different bicycling-related information, but navigating to a volunteering area is not easy. The only way to get to the volunteering page is by going through the donation page, clicking businesses in the paragraph, and clicking on volunteers on the left-hand side.

Empathy interviews

 An empathy interview is not a planned interview, but it's asking questions like how the user feels and for them to expand on those feelings. I interviewed two different people, and they both expressed their concerns about the website. I asked a middle-aged man, who is not the best with technology, and he had difficulties with the site. Some challenges included not knowing where to go when prompted with a question. The other person was a twenty-year-old girl who was overwhelmed with the overall layout of the website. The interviews helped to give me an idea of how the users were feeling while using the site.

First click test

The First Click Test is to see if a user can figure out the right place to click first to complete a goal. For this first click test, the user was asked: “Where can you find the bicycle laws?” The users were given as much time as possible to complete this task. The 1st first click test was conducted by printing out screenshots of the homepage and asking users to the spot by circling where they would click first. The 2nd first click test used UsabilityHub. There were 12 total users, and only 8% of them chose the correct spot to click. This data showed that users could not find the right areas to click the first time. 

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

The Competitive Analysis compares how your site looks next to similar locations. This competitive analysis compared four bicycle-related websites. The main things analyzed were style, usability, structure, and redundancy. 

A/b testing

An A/B test is when there are two different designs of a website, and they are chosen based on what users prefer. This A/B test had the original Wisconsin Bike Federation's design versus an updated version made to be more simple. An experiment was conducted on Usability, where users picked what design they preferred. 

elito method

This last research method focuses more on an in-depth look at an explanation of the observation. This method is another chart that breaks down three observations. Those observations can be looked at in different ways.