Methodology
Researcher
3 UX Researchers
Mar – May 2017 (2 months)
The Kamoinge Workshop is a group of African-American photographers supporting young and emerging artists within the community. Its website aims to showcase the members’ work, to publicize current and past exhibitions, and eventually to provide opportunities for their members and sell original artworks. Collaborating and meeting with the representatives in Kamoinge at Usability Theory & Practice class, we conducted the usability testing and proposed our suggestions on improving the user experience on Kamoinge’s website.
We presented our methodology of the study, findings, and suggestions to the client and provided the full usability testing report as deliverables for them.
Our goals are to identify and prioritize usability issues on the Kamoinge website by analyzing qualitative and quantitative data from the tests and to design recommendations for the site.
In keeping with Kamoinge’s stated desire for a diverse audience to their site, we defined the target user profile and recruited a diverse pool of participants who match the target profile:
3 tasks representing typical use cases of the site were developed for our participants:
Overall, all participants expressed interest and admiration for the art of Kamoinge. However, they did experience some problems with the interface when achieving the tasks.
Users were too impatient to read the whole web content on Kamoinge’s site due to perceived “walls of text” throughout the site.
Break up dense paragraphs into legible and scannable chunks of text content to make users read your words. Use distinct groupings by subtitles and shorter paragraphs separated by whitespaces. Add a photo gallery to capture the users’ attention and to communicate Kamoinge’s mission and vision.
Overlapping information categories and several links labeled “More” on the homepage were pain points during navigation for most participants in the usability test.
Model top-level navigation and eliminate duplicate content to match user needs and design a more navigation-friendly layout for the homepage. The new homepage welcomes the visitor with high-impact photography, useful information, anda concise description of the Collective’s core mission.
Many users expressed that they wanted an easier way to look for specific artists or artwork attributes on the page rather than having to read through each biography.
Embrace image-focused design on the “Photographers” page and add search filters. Celebrate the photography while giving users the freedom to search photographers by name, location, or photography format.
The usability testing study for Kamoinge went great. The client was pleased that we provided a very detailed report, which was helpful for them to enhance the site. From the study, I learned that understanding the purpose or objective of the site with the client was important so that we could define the scope of the study and help them achieve the goal.
