APPROACH

This project is currently ongoing. The approach outlined below was developed to aid the client in thoroughly assessing their website for its adherence to usability best practices and assessing its usefulness for their target audiences.

    Heuristic Evaluation

Having a fresh perspective and no prior familiarity with this website allowed me to complete an unbiased heuristic evaluation of the site, evaluating it on over 200 usability guidelines. The evaluation was broken into the following segments:

For each segment, the site was evaluated for its compliance against a checklist of usability guidelines, and each segment scored. I prepared recommendations for changes based on findings and presented these opportunities for improvement to the client.

    Personas

I began by researching statistics about adoption and demographic information of both adoptive parents and birth mothers. The research uncovered some surprising information that was contrary to my own assumptions. Based on the knowledge gained during the research phase, I developed personas that are representative of the target audience types: (1) Expectant Mothers, (2) Adoptive Families. Personas include basic demographic information as well as goals, motivations, and frustrations that help to develop mental models and anticipate user behaviors.

These personas will also be used to further align the site design, goals, organizational strategy to these specific user groups.

    User Testing

Motivations and goals are vastly different for each audience type, so I formulated usability testing scenarios and tasks unique for each group.

I recruited two users who matched the demographic information for adoptive mothers and ran user testing sessions in person, which were about 15 minutes long each. This allowed me to ask the follow-up and clarifying questions on the spot, and keep the testing fluid and adaptable. These sessions were conducted on a laptop, because adoptive families often set up profiles on multiple websites, and many have their bios, photos, letters, and other descriptive information already saved on their computers.

Recruiting users to complete testing from the birth mother perspective was a challenge due to the sensitive nature of the situation where birth mothers would be visiting this website, so I opted to use a remote usability testing service, TryMyUI.com. I described the scenario to set the stage for participants and asked them to imagine the thoughts and feelings they might have if they unexpectedly learned they were pregnant. Three sessions total were ordered - two mobile sessions and one desktop session - to test the usability of the website on different devices. I reasoned that the birth mother audience would be more likely to find and browse the website on a mobile device due to the technology usage habits of the age characteristics of this audience.