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SF.GOV Usability Testing & Research Report
An evaluative research project.
Overview
Completed as part of the Design Research class at , this evaluative research project lasted four weeks and was divided into three parts (preliminary research, usability testing, and results & recommendations) with a final presentation to summarize the findings.
While some in-class exercises were completed with a partner, each student was assigned their own website to test and base their individual report on.
Role: Lead UX Researcher
Tools: UserTesting.com, Zoom
Duration: Four weeks
Methodology: Usability testing
Background
is primarily used by residents (or potential residents) and business owners in San Francisco who are looking for information relating to the various departments and services offered by the city.
The information provided relates to everything from booking the city hall for a wedding to learning more about jury duty to ordering a birth certificate; all of this information should be easily accessible to anyone eighteen years of age and over who has internet access and is living or working in San Francisco, no matter how “tech-savvy” they are.
Initial observations
The website provides quite a bit of information, but does not make it easily accessible; it isn’t clearly organized, the search feature isn’t always effective, and users are often required to scroll through too much irrelevant information to find what they’re looking for.
Heuristic evaluation & competitive analysis
In order to familiarize myself with , I began with a heuristic evaluation using the .
The heuristic evaluation made it clear from the beginning that while the website appeared to have a clean, simple, clear design, there were a number of serious issues that affected basic usability.
For example, something that became apparent quite quickly was that most of the pages within sf.gov were, in fact, links to separate websites, which made it seem like sf.gov was created to be an information ‘hub’, not a website that a person would visit to submit paperwork or apply for a permit (I later found out through trial and error that certain applications could be submitted through sf.gov).
After finishing the heuristic evaluation, I completed a competitive analysis in order to better understand the purpose of the website, who its customers are, and what tasks they were coming to the website to complete. I also compared sf.gov to other governmental websites which provide similar services .
Usability testing
Before conducting six usability tests of the website (three moderated in-person, three unmoderated via ), I developed a scenario and set of tasks based on what I had discovered during the Preliminary Research phase of the project.
Results
Through user testing, I discovered that participants consistently ran into issues with two aspects of the website: searching and scrolling.
The search bar, one of the first features people noticed on the home page, often proved to be ineffective in bringing up results that were related to the terms the participant had entered. Those who did have success with the search bar almost never found what they were looking for on the first try. The only exception seemed to be when the terms “marriage city hall” and “wedding city hall” were used.
The other issue that arose was related to the organization of the “Departments” page (pictured below). Including everything from “Airport Commission” to “Office of Cannabis”, this page seemed to have it all; in fact, it had a total of ninety-six terms! Although they were organized in alphabetical order, there was no way to sort (or ‘jump’, as one participant put it) through the list of terms. Participants often gave up on the page when scrolling through the list of departments because they incorrectly assumed they were looking in the wrong place. While some eventually figured out that they were on the correct page (after looking elsewhere), this design flaw led to others giving up on the task entirely.
Recs.
Unreliable searches lead to distrust in both the website and the city government itself; therefore, it is my recommendation that creating a search feature which can reliably retrieve relevant information for its users should become a top priority for the design team working on the sf.gov website.
Once problems with the search feature have been addressed, I believe the design team should reconsider the informational structure of the “Departments” page, which requires users to scroll through too many terms in order to find what they are looking for.
Based on my research, I found that the current design doesn’t allow users to browse for information very efficiently, and in some cases, this got in the way of them from finding the information altogether.
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