Testing for Usability

After drawing a basic plan for the site pages, I tested it with a few people to see if they understood the navigation.

These volunteers clicked through a simplified version of the site to perform some common tasks we'd expect our regular visitors to do.

One interesting finding was related to a version of the site that had a special section called "Research" to highlight the research and exploration performed by the group I work for. When viewing the site, some of testers interpreted it to mean THEIR research and how our group could help. Because of this, I chose to remove the section and fold that content into sections called "Online Resources" and "News and Events."

Our test users also preferred a simpler page header with fewer supplemental links to other Ohio State services. For this reason, we moved them to the bottom of the page.