Overview
As a freelancer I engaged with a boutique consulting firm that was conducting a web refresh to improve their online presence. As a part of their transformation, I conducted a Usability and Accessibility Audit of their current state to understand any lapses in UX they might currently have and how to avoid them in their redesign.
My Roles and Responsibilities
My role in this project was to assess two key pages of the site of their choosing at a granular level.
The pages the client asked me to look over were two pages highlighting their service offerings. Before diving in to the clients website, I wanted to get a good understanding of how these pages are typically presented to their audiences. IÂ looked at three leading consulting companies to understand how industry superstars present their information to their prospective clients, and tried to better understand the challenges that can come from showcasing potentially complex information on web. The three companies I looked at were: McKinsey, Bain, and BCG.
Despite these three organizations being competitors each other, their pages outlining their services all followed the same pattern:
My goals for this project were to:
The Nielsen Norman Group is among the industry leaders in user experience design and research, and consulting them felt like a natural first step. Referring to their article on 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, I compiled a collection of principles that applied to the website and began to organize them into their own categories for easier reference. In addition to the Nielsen Norman Group, I also looked towards the Ontario Digital Service. The Ontario Digital Service is a provincial government body committed to building digital tools and standards for the many ministries. The Ontario Digital Service Standard is a collection of principles that helps ministries and agencies design and build with accessible requirements in mind. I leaned on them to understand how they present similar concepts and how to simplify the language. During this process, I transitioned to identifying principles tied to accessibility. With Accessibility being a key component of this assessment, I turned to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to identify additional key principles to build the framework with. With all of this in mind, I mapped out the framework.
To create the framework, IÂ established nine key principles to assess the UX of website and applications. These nine principles were organized into three distinct categories to communicate their purpose and create easy reference for which aspect of the assessment is being covered.
To create the framework, IÂ established nine key principles to assess the UX of website and applications. These nine principles were organized into three distinct categories to communicate their purpose and create easy reference for which aspect of the assessment is being covered.
Navigation is how the user gets around your website. Your users need to be able to find what they need without being overwhelmed by what’s on the screen.
Presentation is how your website is seen by your users. It needs to be consistent, accessible, and visually appealing.
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Organization is how your information is presented to your users. It needs to be easy for them to understand.
Across the client's site, the biggest issue that was flagged was a lack of cohesion from page to page. It was difficult to find key information from the different pages for their services due to a variety of different layouts and styling being used. One way to rectify this was to create a template for each service page to follow. This would offer the user a simpler browsing experience, and reduce the cognitive efforts they would have to go through to find the information they need.
To build the template, IÂ leveraged the layouts used in the three examples above.
