A usability approach to fostering a sense of community among
Port Washington Children's Center's parents
Year / 2023
Client / Port Washington Children's Center, New York
Team Members / Bhavana P,. Esha M., Julia M., Laiba S.
My Role / Moderated Usability Testing, Data Analysis, UX strategy
Any children's educational institution must include the parents as integral players. The Port Washington Children's Center contacted us to learn more about how they could improve their current website better serve the needs of the parents.
Four Pratt students donned the role of usability experts and set out to carefully evaluate the websites' usability and, to recommend actionable solutions so that the parents of Port Washington Children's Center could effortlessly connect with the center for any information or services.
About Port Washington Children's Center/
The Port Washington Children’s Center was established in 1977 as a non-profit, non-sectarian child care center. They provide quality childcare and educational programs for young children in the Port Washington, New York community.
The center offers a wide range of programs for children from toddlers of age of 18 months through the school-age of 12 years, including full-day childcare, preschool, and pre-kindergarten classes. With highly qualified staff members and teachers, they put a high priority on giving the kids a secure, nurturing, and exciting environment.
Establishing evaluation goals
As, we usability experts, we conducted moderated usability tests focused on four main tasks which encompassed our evaluation goals keeping in mind some important usability parameters-
Usability Parameters:
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Website navigation
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Clarity and tone of labels and content
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Readability of information
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Imagery and visual design
Tasks:
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Using the Homepage
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Enrolling their child in a program
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Using FAQs to find information
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Finding the mission statement
For a better clarity of the evaluation goals, understanding the organisational goals of the client is key.
Which is why, for this usability study, it was also important to undestand the user group (parents) of PWCC’s website and their relationship with the client (PWCC). With this approach we were able to align our evaluation goals with the client brief.
Identifying Research Participants and Recruitment
We reached out to parents of PWCC’s community and parents residing in New York by sending out a Google form where participants were asked to fill out their time and availability for the usability test along with additional demographic information such as their age and their children’s age groups. The Google form was sent to the mailing list of PWCC as well as our own personal circles. We also posted a graphic flyer on PWCC’s social media platforms for better visibility. The flyer directed interested participants to the Google form. The test guaranteed an Amazon Gift card which was offered upon completion of the test as an incentive.
All in all, we were able to recruit 8 participants in total among which seven were parents of the PWCC community and one was an external user experience designer and parent residing in New York City. This sample mix gave us greater understanding of the community's needs as well as expert perspectives on the website's current user experience, supporting certain inconsistencies that parents appeared to encounter when using the website.
Total No. of Participants: 8
Participant Profile: Parents within the PWCC community or residing in New York City
Fig 1. Graphic flyer that was posted on PWCC’s social media channels for recruiting participants
One of the most difficult parts of our project was finding participants. We chose to put the visual banner on PWCC's Facebook page after many emails to participants ended in failure.
It was noted that having a visual aspect attracted participants with a stronger effect in addition to the fact that PWCC's Facebook page had a better engagement rate among parents.
An overview of the project timeline
Late February, 2023
Kick-off Meeting with the PWCC Team
Mid March, 2023
May, 2023
Final Presentation
and Handover
Mid-Point
Check-in
Research Planning
Recruiting participants and preparing tasks + moderation scripts
Conducting moderated usability tests
Data Collection & Analysis
Ideating design solutions & prototyping mock-ups
Report-making
Conducting Moderated Usability Tests
The usability testing was done over Zoom after participants confirmed their availability. We maintained an interview guide based on the four key tasks to ensure the usability test ran successfully. The interview guide was a document containing the interview questionnaire along with the pre-task and post-task questions.
Some of the key research questions that guided our interview questions are summed up below -
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Is it easy for users to navigate through the homepage?
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Does the ‘Learning’ section provide users with adequate and clear information about PWCC’s programs?
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Is it easy for users to discover and follow through with the enrollment process described on the website?
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Do users find the overall tone and wording and design of the website consistent?
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Are the current FAQs on the website providing users with adequate information?
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Are donors attracted to the site and are able to donate?
💡 Including pre-task and post-task questions along with conducting some follow-up conversations through mindful probing enabled us to capture parents' needs and motivations for using the website. For this very purpose, the interviews were surgically moderated in a semi-structured manner, leaving room for probing questions.
‼️ Pilot interviews are important! Surgical probing is a thing!! If a participant feels stuck or is unable to complete a task, the usability expert should neither direct them to the solution nor discourage them.
FINDINGS &
RECOMMENDATIONS
💡 For the analysis we logged the participants’ responses and obseverations onto a Google spreadsheet which were then qualitatively coded to see emerging patterns and problems. This proved to be an efficient use of our time as our user data was readily organised (while user interviews continued to happen silmutaneously) so that we could individually analyse the results before sharing our findings within the team.
Three major problems emerged as findings from the usability tests that we conducted. The problems were taken up for discussion by the team to ideate actionable solutions.
Problem #1: Using the Homepage on Mobile View
Despite the fact that seven (7) out of eight (8) parents used their mobile phones to access the PWCC website and, used the homepage for high-level navigation (instead of using the navigation menu), the homepage did not perform as well when it came it to its responsiveness for mobile usabilty.
We found out that parents wanted to see information about long term programs, facilities provided by the center, tuition, schedule, child development, first. One of the main issues that the current homepage layout did not prioritise surfacing this information first. Instead a significant amount of screen space taken up by promotional information. There were some other issues that were also identified regarding the mobile responsiveness of the homepage that are shown below.
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Recommendation:
To resolve the usability issues regarding the mobile responsiveness of the homepage we designed a mock-up that supported our recommendations -
Problem #2: Distrust in payment process while making a donation
The payment pages for Tuition and Donation have a third party service which is not controlled by Port Washington There were no warning signs that the websited suggested before users could switch to an external third-party web service. Thus, making it less likely for users to trust the site.
Recommendation:
To resolve the usability issues regarding the mobile responsiveness of the homepage we designed a mock-up that supported our recommendations -
#Problem 3 : Inconsistencies in program sections
This can be understood as an issue of having multiple sections offering overlapping program-related information. We observed that the users expected to find tuition information, schedule and enrollment information with the same page or section of the program. This requirement was not sufficed on the current programs section of the website and left them scrolling through to find the related documents. Another finding was the inconsistencies in the organisation of content based on labels mentioned in the navigation bar.
Recommendation:
To resolve the issues in the program sections we designed mock-ups that support our recommendations -
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In conclusion /
The insights and recommedations that resulted from our moderated remote usability tests were appreciated by the client as actionable solutions. Upon further debrief, we ideated some additional design strategies for the the branding and labelling of content of the website. We also addressed certain limitations that we were posed with during the interviews such as the poor Wi-Fi reception in the Port Washington region that might hinder the accessibility of the website.
Besides the major problems addressed through our study, the PWCC website performed well for users as they seemed to have familiarised with its existing design. The use of colour and imagery was an important aspect of a childrens website according to parents and it’s “child-friendly” design appealed to them. Our interventions primarily focused on the restructuring of some content and user flows alonside the inclusion of some additional features.
Given the opportunity, I would love to be a part of the redesign process to actualise our recommendations!
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