Taxonomy

I've conducted a few usability tests for our website. Whenever working on a new website design we would ask our students (I work at a university) to participate in a usability study. To get students attention 15 - 30 minutes of their free time, we had to give some incentive such as 5$ to 10$ gift certificate for the cafe. Our typical user was a graduate student, very busy and smart.

In our usability studies we found out that the main problem was TAXONOMY. We asked the students to accomplish specific task on our website. Some of the headings/ names would only make sense to us: staff. If the vocabulary was related to a specific environment/ industry and the user was not familiar with it this could create a potential problem. During the study, we noticed that as a staff we tend to classify and organize the knowledge under different categories than the students. What we found out was that our students would create different categories, or they would look for a specific task under different name. Because graduate students come from so different backgrounds the challenge is to create just one user profile that would match our average student.

After completing the study we had to revise our initial idea for the new navigation. We had to make new categories and change some names to be more understandable for a broader audience and for our students.