Janet Chang’s Blog about Design

Washington Department of Licensing Website Redesign

Suzanne Boyd and Emma Rose from Anthro-Tech talked about their usability research methodologies when they were commissioned by the Washington Department of Licensing for its Website redesign project in 2005.

Step 1- Discovering users’ mental models

• Users’ mental models dictate how they look for information.
• When the information architecture reflects users mental models, they can find what they need.

Methods and Analyze the data: A combination of card sort study

• Content ranking – to find out what users care about most. (Descriptive data analyze)
• Card sort - to see how users group content (cluster analysis. From there, a category labels are produced which turn into thematize data analyze)
• Focus group – to understand why users organized it that way and what doesn’t fit. (code it and summarize data analyze)

Findings on users’ mental models

• Strong mental model (information users are familiar about the site)
  Groupings to topics (vehicles, licensing)
  Task based (renew, replace, update)
  Life events (move, start a business, first licenses)
• Weak mental model (information users aren’t familiar or not sure about the site)
  Breadth of services (users don’t know if the department of licensing offers these services or not)
  ID cards and Disabled parking permits (not sure where this fit into which one category
  They fit into multiple categories)

Step 2 –Creating an interactive prototype

Process and software used for this project:

1. Develop stage (tool used - Microsoft Word)
2. Visualize stage (tool used - Mind Manger)
3. Test stage (tool used - HTML Prototype)
4. Manage (tool used- Microsoft Excel)

Step 3 - Phone usability testing (evaluating the information architecture)