THE OASIS LUBBOCK: USABILITY TEST REPORT John Moore, Emma Seidensticker, and Kristen West December 10, 2016 English 3367
Table of Contents Summary... 1 Procedure... 1 Recruitment... 1 Pre-Test... 1 Tasks... 2 Task One... 2 Task Two... 2 Task Three... 3 Post-Test... 3 Findings... 3 Tested Users... 4 Overall Task Outcomes... 4 Task One... 4 Task Two... 4 Task Three... 5 Recommendations... 5 Technical... 5 Aesthetic... 6 Functional... 6 Conclusion... 6
Page 1 Summary This report will detail our usability test of Oasis Center's website and the resulting findings and recommendations. The project was educational in its nature but also involved real clients who were interested in the results. These results were gained by putting three volunteers through a usability test that is described in detail in the Procedure section. The results are listed in the findings section, which includes summaries of the participant actions and comments during tasks, as well as the details of the questionnaires and surveys we administered. These results and findings are evaluated and turned into a recommendation in the final section. This recommendation summarizes potential changes in the structure of the site, the wording and textual organization, as well as possible new features. Procedure This section describes how we recruited participants, each of our three tasks, and pre and post test procedures. Recruitment Our team used Facebook to recruit our friends for this test. We would have liked to test using The Oasis Lubbock patients, but due to time constraints and patient confidentiality issues, we tested from a supply of highly available college students. Our tasks and questionnaires reflect our endeavor to make the results of this usability test relevant for the target audience. Five recruits were chosen and given pre-test questions to complete before testing. On November 29, we brought them to the TTU Usability Lab for testing. Because of technological issues and an overly tight schedule, we were only able to test three of our five participants. This was not a drawback because by the third test, the data we were gathering stagnated. All five participants received chocolate coin incentives and our gratitude. Pre-Test Once we had scheduled our five participants, we e-mailed them the following questions: Age: Gender: 1. Which would you most likely use to visit a medical center s website? a. Phone b. Desktop Computer c. Laptop Computer d. ipad/tablet e. Other: 2. How do you prefer to access information related to your medical care? a. Internet b. Brochure/Pamphlet c. Over the phone d. In person e. Other: 3. What do you expect to find when you visit a care-provider s website?
Page 2 After completion, they received directions to the Usability Lab. We made sure to stay in contact with our participants between conscription and the commencement of the test. They received a map to the lab, a picture of the outside of the lab, and our phone numbers in case of an emergency. Tasks We decided on three tasks because the website is simplistic and needs a strong foundation if it is going to grow. We tested whether people could find what services The Oasis Lubbock provides, what the doctors credentials are, and locate the Patient Fusion sign-in page. These key functions need to be easy to perform if the website is to successfully connect patients and families to quality care. Task One Patients need to know what services The Oasis Lubbock provides, which is why we decided to see how people go about finding that information. Our first task reads: Your sister suffers from depression, and you want to help her. You heard about The Oasis and decided to check out their website. Find out if they can help your sister with depression. After the participant completed the task, our moderator asked them the following questions: Questions It was easy to find the information on depression The website s wording was easy to understand The website s design was simple and not distracting Why did you give these ratings? Strongly Agree Agree Neither Agree or Disagree Disagree Strongly Disagree These questions are slightly positively bias. Participants often want to say pleasant things about a product, so they are more likely to answer positively. To cut down on that bias, the questions would need to be changed to include some negativity, for example, instead of saying, The website s wording was easy to understand, negate it to read, The website s wording was difficult to understand. This will ensure that the participant gives balanced feedback in the future. In the questionnaires to come, this criticism remains relevant. Task Two Patients also need to be able to read up on their future doctor s credentials. To make sure this information was easy to find, we gave the following task: You read a good review online about Dr. Weldon Ash, the resident psychiatrist, and visit The Oasis website to find out more. Find out where Dr. Ash went to medical school.
Page 3 After this task, our moderator asked the following questions: 1. What was the first navigation link you went to? Was it "Staff?" If not, what link was it? 2. Was it apparent that pictures and text on the "Staff" page were hyperlinks? 3. Did the information provided about Dr. Ash seem relevant? Was anything missing? Task Three Lastly, The Oasis Lubbock patients need to be able to locate the Patient Fusion sign-in page. Since a patient would already know what that is, we gave our participants the same basic knowledge to close the gap between our target audience and the college kids performing the test. The final task reads: For the last task, let me tell you about Patient Fusion. It s a service The Oasis offers to help patients connect to their doctors and therapists. You re a patient at the oasis and you need to connect to your doctor. Find the Patient Fusion sign in page. After completing this task, the moderator asked these questions: 1. Was the navigation path clear or unclear? Is "Patient Resources" the first link you chose? If not, what was and why? 2. The large green button on the "Patient Resources" page was the hyperlink to Patient Fusion. Was it a clear that that would take you to the sign in page? Why? 3. How would you change the functionality and/or appearance of this button, if you could? Post-Test After all tasks were completed, we gave each participant a questionnaire to discover their overall reaction to the website. They had as much time as they needed to complete the following questions: 1. What if anything did you feel was missing from the site? Informational or otherwise? 2. Do you think this website characterizes the Oasis Center? If you aren't familiar with the Center, then does the site seem like an appropriate home for a Counseling Center? 3. Did you expect more from the site? What else can the site be a place for? 4. Lastly, what did you like or dislike about the site? Findings The users we found were college students that had basic working knowledge of computers and the Internet. Since anyone can use the counseling center, our demographics are open to all ages, genders, and social and economic backgrounds. Because of the time restraint, we could not recruit users that are more likely to visit the website - I.e. people likely to experience depression and anxiety.
Page 4 Below is information about the users that were used to factor in their responses. Users answered pre-test questions before they entered the entered the testing environment. Tested Users User 1: Kailey Snead Age: 19 Gender: Female Preferred Method of Viewing Website: Laptop/Computer Preferred Method of Accessing Medical Information: In person Expected Outcome: "General Information about available times to come in and costs with insurance. Also what types of care they provide to patients." User 2: Samuel Acosta Age: 19 Gender: Male Preferred Method of Viewing Website: Laptop/Computer Preferred Method of Accessing Medical Information: Over the phone Expected Outcome: "Mainly I look for contact information and location of the medical center. Generally the layout is simple so the information is easier to find." User 3: Hannah Brittingham Age: 19 Gender: Female Preferred Method of Viewing Website: Laptop/Computer Preferred Method of Accessing Medical Information: Internet Expected Outcome: "General office hours, if there are multiple doctors: who works when, drop down or slide out menus, which insurance plans are or are not accepted, if the place offers certain features that all facilities might not have." Overall Task Outcomes How long did each task take? User 1 User 2 User 3 Average Task 1 1:02 1:06 1:50 1:32 Task 2 0:20 0:21 0:28 0:23 Task 3 0:15 0:13 0:27 0:18 Task One Kailey mentioned in her testing session that she thought that all the information could be put into bullets to make it easier to find and skim over. Both Kailey and Hannah liked that there was a FAQ tab on the home page because it is a common feature on most websites. Sam thought that the website's wording was a little difficult to understand because of its ambiguity. Overall, task one was completed in about a minute and a half, and there were no serious errors. Task Two All three users immediately clicked on the Staff tab at the top of the homepage. Upon finding Dr. Ash's picture, they clicked on the hyperlink text, his name, under the picture. One user said that they knew his picture was a hyperlink as well because his picture had a blue border around it. The other two users did
Page 5 not know his picture was clickable, although it did not present any major problems. The users also thought that the amount of information about the doctor was appropriate without disclosing too much information or not giving enough of his credentials. Each participant though this was the easiest task. Task Three All of the users clicked on the Patient Resources tab initially because the task insinuated that the Patient Fusion sign-in would be a resource that patients accessed online. Once the users reached the landing page, they were each inclined to press the green button labeled "Patient Fusion" because of how big and green it was, which signaled to them that they could comfortably press it. The link took them to the log-in page where each user felt assured that they had completed the task. Recommendations Our usability tests and the related questionnaires gave us insight into what our users thought about the site and how we could make it better. Each task was designed to test navigation and site functionality. The questionnaires were designed to gather feedback on those experiences. These findings were compiled into three recommendations. The recommendations can be categorized as such: technical, functional, and aesthetic. For technical issues, we are talking about things like scripting issues in the code of the page and the failure of embedded or otherwise implemented features. Functional issues are problems that prevent the user from achieving the intended purpose of the site design. That is, do the elements lend themselves to a userfriendly experience? Aesthetic issues are either inappropriate for the tone of the site or distract from the purpose, such as distracting images or ambiguous language. Technical The technical issues are evident at first glance, as noted by one of our users during a task: "This page hurts my eyes." There are alignment problems with various elements. They are distracting, but can be easily fixed. The webmaster should have enough knowledge of HTML and CSS to apply the necessary fixes, which are listed below. The Homepage, figure 1, resembles other pages. It has a header image and left aligned text. The navigation menu has a slight left-margin, and then the slideshow is center-aligned. All these elements can be placed on the page in a more uniform way by shifting the navigation menu to the left and extending it to cover the width of the page. The solution is to use the CSS property of float. In the style sheet, add "float: left" to the <nav> element with a margin and Figure 1: The Oasis Lubbock Homepage padding of 0px. This will anchor the navigation menu to the left margin along with the header image and body of text. After that, extend the menu itself by changing the "display: inline" to "display: block" in the <nav> section of the style sheet.
Page 6 These changes to the navigation menu will create solidarity on the page as well as separate the static elements above from the page content below. Aesthetic Our users commented in their task surveys and questionnaires that the bodies of text in paragraph were difficult. The consensus was that these should be bullets of information rather than blocks of text. Figure 2: The FAQ page As seen in figure 2, the FAQ page highlights these overwhelming blocks of text. A better way to organize the information, is to use bullets to break up chunks of information. As for the colors, users were pleased with the scheme and commented that they felt it gave a calm and soothing presence to the site. It is easy on the eyes and invokes peace of mind. As for the structure of the elements, this was addressed in the Technical subsection and is strongly recommended as it does distract from the purpose of the site, which is to help stabilize people and their lives. Functional The large green "Patient Fusion" button was popular among our users as a sort of mascot of the site, but there were suggestions that the log-in page could be embedded on the site instead of using a giant button as an external link. In figure 3, notice the sheer size of the button compared to the other elements on the page. This caused some amusement among our users as well as fondness, but there was a consensus that there is a better way to support easy access to the Patient Fusion log-in. The most elegant solution would be to embed a log-in on the page. Embedding simply allows a page to host the content of another site. So, the Patient Resource page would contain information for Patient Fusion as well as an actual log-in connected directly to Patient Fusion. Figure 3: The Patient Fusion Button Aside from that issue, the navigation of the site was functional and received high praise from our users Conclusion The testing of this site through the TTU Usability Lab allowed us to gain new insight. As we became all too familiar with the site, we lost our perspective on what was lacking and how it could be improved. Bringing in fresh eyes gave us the inspiration to nail down some helpful recommendations. The new site will benefit from these changes and is ready for new additions as they become necessary in the expansion of The Oasis Lubbock.