RIT.edu Usability Study
UX Research
Designed and ran a usability study for the RIT Marketing Department on RIT’s website with parents of prospective students to direct future iterations of the website
Understanding parents’ needs
To test the usability of RIT.EDU for parents of prospective students, we first sat down with the RIT Marketing department to better understand this user group.
In our study we aimed to answer what factors are most important to prospective parents when choosing between different schools and are prospective parents able to easily find information on programs, cost, aid, admissions requirements, and visiting campus.
We recognized that the departments idea of parents’ goals was assumed rather than founded in research, so along with our study we conducted a brief semi-structured interview before the test to document their goals.
Developing tasks to reflect assumed goals
Look and feel of the homepage
Available programs
Program search feature
Specific program details
Financial aid
Cost of tuition
Booking an on-campus tour
The programs of study tool is used to filter and display all the available majors at RIT. In the design tested during this study all the results of the search were displayed below the fold, causing confusion and frustration for users.
Adapting our test plan after a pilot test
The pilot participant moved through tasks with increasing speed as she moved through the site because of her previous experience on it. It became clear that our test plan followed an order that would cause transfer of learning to skew our results. Because of this, we counterbalanced the order of our tasks.
Tasks 1 and 2 both deal with programs of study so they remained grouped together while counterbalancing.
Task 3 covers tuition and financial aid.
Task 4 is about booking a tour. It is always last because it is the least important and would be cut for time if necessary
Communicating our results to the client
From our 8 participants, we collected a lot of qualitative data that we then needed to share with RIT. Some key usability issues stood out and we covered these by highlighting user comments and producing highlight videos.
Layout and Spacing
“There is too much scrolling to get to what I want to see. The news section makes me think I’m at the end of the page.”
— Participant 6
“There is too much other information before the admission requirements. I wish they were higher up on the page.”
— Participant 7
Program of Study Finder Tool
“When I click a category, it doesn’t show me any results. It should show me the results somewhere without scrolling.”
— Participant 5
“Why do I need the find now button when I can click on the different categories?”
— Participant 4
Highlight reel played for the marketing team to show the volume of mobile content and the issues it caused for users in this study.
Prioritizing design implications
Refine content layout, especially mobile
Order content by importance to users
Evaluate global search functionality
Evaluate design of icons, images, and text in regards to clickability
Evaluate accessibility of the cost of attendance section
Expanding scholarship content to include more details
Further research navigation menu functionality
Adjust location and feedback of displayed results on ‘Programs of ‘Study finder tool
Programs of study tool 3 months after our work for the RIT Marketing Team