UX Research for RMF Site Redesign:

Texas Association of School Boards (TASB)

The Online Communications team pursued the Risk Management Fund  (RMF) groups online re-design contract.

The RMF group aimed to enhance the online accessibility of their primary business offerings, ensuring greater availability and improved access for both internal and external clients.

Role

  • UX Research & Design

Year

  • 2012

Deliverables

  • Stakeholder interviews

  • UX Research planning

  • User Testing

  • User interviews

  • UX Research Synthesis

  • Heuristic Evaluation

  • Information Architecture

  • Report Authoring & Presentation

  • Competitive Analysis

Pain Points

Customers trend towards calling in for services instead of finding solutions online.

  • High rate of inbound calls and overhead to follow up.

  • Critical service are difficult to locate on the legacy site, time consuming to manage and incur a strain on CSR’s.

  • Outdated look, feel and site performance reflects badly.

  • Some services are inaccessible online and require off channel contact.

RMF leadership is apprehensive to proceed with a re-design and want to validate the customer complaints.

Discovery

Interviews: Internal Stakeholders

Pros:

  • Satisfying the customer brings alot of joy.
  • They care about the organization’s purpose, clients & are committed to Texas public education.

Cons:

  • Customers try to accomplish tasks online but grow frustrated with the website.
  • They abandon the site and call or email in their questions and requests.

Bring focus to who the external customer is and their needs.

Conceptual Personas

Seeking a deeper understanding of this user group.

Types of customers:

  • school faculty
  • facilities maintenance
  • superintendent team

All have different claims management needs and priorities.

 

Evaluating site heuristics & usability

Information architecture fails to support service mental model.

Legacy site developed in Flash: hampers accessibility, performance, maintenance and SEO. 

Confusing, unique navigation model.

High abandonment rate.

Request for Information (RFI)

  • We created a RFI and UX Research Proposal to present to the RMF group

  • identify current obstacles to service

  • identify methods to enable online services

Get data to validate project initiation:

  • site analytics
  • domain traffic
  • page abandonment

Capture user sentiment:

  • needs
  • what works
  • frustrations
  • basic task completion

Opportunity: Usability testing

External Stakeholders: Customers

The annual TASB RMF Members Conference  provides a opportunity to do live, one-on-one guerilla testing.

Candidate sourcing: CSR interaction records, frequent call customers.

Built screeners. Categorized respondents according to prioritized service needs. 

We used free ice cream as incentives in exchange for their time.

Authoring interview protocol

Respondent segmentation drives proctoring guidelines and questionnaire tailoring.

  • Qualifiers

  • Context of use

  • Setting up the interview space and hardware configuration

Transcription analysis

 Issue by issue verbatim responses.

Prioritized usability issues.

Assign severity ratings.

Analyze for themes and insights.

Highlighted:

  • blocks
  • task abandonment
  • successes / task completion

Themes of risk tolerance, aversion and managing work load appear often.

Note interactions, attempts at way finding and challenges with content.

Test Findings

Service Delivery

  • Significant task abandonment on primary task flows

  • Cannot located help online

  • “I have a relationship with the staff, I will just call.”

Web Standards

  • Unusual non-intuitive patterns

  • Interaction touch points lack consistency of behaviors

  • Flash elements especially jarring

    Unexpected behavior: UI touch points are inconsistent with best practices

Information Architecture

  • Navigation is not intuitve

  • Lack of wayfinding

  • Lack of information chunking

  • Content is inconsistent, quality issues

  • Labeling does not fit users mental models

Validation the current site hinders customers’ ability to complete tasks and poor content discovery impedes sales.

Competitive Research

Reviewed 22 peer organizations

Assessed competitors for:

  • content, tone
  • online functionality
  • visual style
  • site structure

Broader best practices

Two tiers:

  • In domain – direct competitors
  • In domain – other industries

Competitive Analysis Findings

  • There are many opportunity to leverage online service delivery to become a leader in this space

  • Competitors with the budget to offer highly functional online shopping, marketing and customer service experiences, DO.

Outcome

The Risk Management Fund leadership awarded the contract to the Online Communications Team.

Information Architecture

I had the opportunity to contribute to planning and mapping the Information Architecture.

The navigation and site architecture are blocking points to users.

  • public pages
  • secured services
  • knowledge-base library

Card sorting exercises and affinity maps provided insight how to realign the site with users’ expectations and improve discoverability.

We produced IA artifacts of the current and future content states to communicate the content strategy  vision.

Takeaway

  • I stretched beyond my daily assignments and took advantage of the opportunity to practice and learn new  my UX Research and presentation  skills.

  • My team learned to to take chances and I learned a bunch of new scrappy techniques to make the most of what resources were available.