A Complete approach to website usability
Overview
CADinteractive was asked to undertake a comprehensive usability review of the entire ICO, Information Commissioner's Office site – www.ico.gov.uk. A full qualitative and quantitative study was undertaken involving consultation with approximately 500 site users.
The website is the primary tool for educating business owners and members of the public on their rights and obligations. With an average of 100,000 unique users per month, the ICO recognised the importance of ensuring that their website was easy to use and understand.
Issue
Although CADinteractive undertook the usability testing of the site prior to launch in 2006, the ICO were keen to undertake further testing of the live site once it had matured.
Solution
CADinteractive worked closely with the ICO to identify the business and research objectives. These included:
- Reducing the quantity of calls made to the ICO helpline
- Increasing the rate of task completion for common queries
- Increasing awareness of the ICO’s jurisdiction and role in protecting information
- Ensuring that the navigation was intuitive
- Ensuring that the content is understood by the target audience
The usability review involved three phases:
- An online survey to run for 4 weeks on the ICO website
- Interviews with internal ICO staff focusing on their own experiences with the site
- Lab based usability testing with both business and public users of the site
Phase 1
CADinteractive designed and ran the online survey which would meet the business objectives and also clarify:
- The user demographics
- The customer satisfaction with the information, navigation and site search
- Whether there are any areas of the site which could be developed further
Approximately 500 participants submitted completed surveys and all responses were then analysed by CADinteractive’s team to reveal the key experience trends.
Phases 2 and 3
An appropriate user group sample was agreed with internal stakeholders to represent the site’s typical users.
In each usability session, conducted both at our London labs and at the ICO’s offices, panellists were questioned about their general site use and were then asked to complete a series of set tasks based on the following:
- The most frequent queries received by the ICO’s call centre staff
- The internal stakeholder priorities for review
All of the users' verbal and behavioural responses were recorded, and individual task performance was scored to assess the usability of the site.
Success measures
The ICO’s two main aims are to ensure that public information is available to all and to ensure that personal information is protected from miss-use. In order to educate business owners and members of the public, the website must contain easy to understand site content and this information must be easy to find.
The results of the online survey, internal interviews and lab based usability tests all revealed similar patterns in user behaviour: a need for more practical solution-based guides, a more logical flow through the site’s navigation and a more helpful site search.
The final report contained a presentation of the statistical results from the survey as well as picture-in-picture clips of the usability sessions to illustrate the usability challenges experienced by all the users interviewed.
CADinteractive’s recommendations for best-practice solutions were then fed into the next phase of the site’s development.
