Conducted usability testing and evaluation
of university’s career center website

About Client

The University of Michigan is internationally renowned for its academic excellence. It has an annual student body size of 41,924 and an annual research budget of $1.14 billion.

In order for the university to effectively serve the career needs of its student body, it needed to better understand how well its existing career website functioned. To this end, we set off to closely evaluate iTrack, a career service website of the university.

Methods

Usability testing, Usability evaluation

Web Surveys:
We surveyed 69 students based on student demographics, iTrack functionality, and iTrack usability. We then performed a correlation analysis on all the survey questions and plotted them on a correlation matrix to identify data correlations. We paired strong positive correlations that had only a 1 of 100 chance of being inaccurate.

Usability Testing:
We closely observed the performance and experience of 5 screened users as they completed processes that were critical to successfully using the iTrack website. Our testing focused on aesthetics, functionality, and usability.

Usability Evaluation
We used 46 heuristics to evaluate the 3 core tasks of the site based on the site’s navigation, content, visual design, functionality, and user feedback. We determined what standards constituted being aesthetically pleasing, more functional, and more usable by comparing iTrack features corresponding standards to websites like IBM.com and Monster.com.

Results

• We produced the following report deliverables: User Testing, Usability Review, Web Survey, Vocabulary Analysis, User Testing performance analysis, Generalized Transition Network.
• We discussed and illustrated 22 prioritized and actionable recommendations over the course of 67 pages.