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WSDOT FERRY PAGES USABILITY TESTING
University of Washington
For a class about usability testing, my group focused on the Washington State Department of Transportation ferry website. We conducted heuristic analysis before creating a test kit for studying the most critical parts of the site. Through testing we prioritized the most critical changes to make and made evidence based suggestions on how to make those changes.
WSDOT Ferry Pages Usability Testing: Projects
The Washington State Department of transportation (WSDOT) Ferries offer multiple ferry rides around the Washington state. The WSDOT website provides a platform for ferry users to plan a ferry trip, buy tickets, reserve a vehicle, and view travel conditions. In this study, we focused on the “Planning a Trip” and “Travel Conditions” divisions of the page as those pertain directly to the ferries. Also, those are the parts that contain links to pages that are transactional to the user. Through communicating with the client, the WSDOT team, we found the need for the website to be more efficient as the client wanted to increase users and wanted to decrease the amount of time each user spent on the website to prevent the servers from crashing with the increased traffic.
On order to do this, we recruited eight participants who owned a car and had used the WSDOT service no more than three times. We wanted to make sure that our participants did not have enough experience with the website as to alter the results. To ensure that this was true, all participants completed a pre screener questionnaire to be chosen for the study. During the in-person study, participants were asked to think aloud while they completed five tasks which they did on a computer. These tasks were written to ensure that we could collect data on efficiency and efficacy of using the website. Along with that, the moderator conducted a pretest interview as well as a follow up post task interview after each task, and concluded with a final post test interview.
WSDOT Ferry Pages Usability Testing: Text
WSDOT Ferry Pages Usability Testing: Image
Starting this project, I did not know much about usability testing. The basics are easy to grasp, but the most difficult thing is being though with your planning and execution. Once you have participants getting the data isn't too hard. The question is whether you are thorough enough in your research to know what data you need, and consistent enough in your testing that the data isn't compromised. Throughout the class I learned about designing research questions, different organizations for participant groups, and much more. Not only that, but I was also able to directly deal with user research tools that help in the collection and organization of results. As with many tools, they had as many problems as it solved, so being able to have access to the, now gave me the experience I needed to go into industry and use them competently.
WSDOT Ferry Pages Usability Testing: Text
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