Evaluating the usability of the MAMFT website
Client - Minnesota Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (MAMFT)
The Minnesota Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (MAMFT) is a non-profit professional organization that promotes and helps maintain high professional standards of ethics and practice, encourages continued professional education, and works cooperatively with the Minnesota Board of Marriage and Family Therapy.
My role: Research, Information Architecture, UX/UI, Wireframing, Prototyping
Deliverables
Usability testing plan
Findings and Recommendations report
Tools
Sketch
Axure
Trello
Google slides
Methods
In person usability testing
Remote usability testing
Project Overview
The Challenge
Our design team was asked by MAMFT to evaluate the usability of their website and give visualized recommended changes.
High Level Goals
Gain insight into the perceived utility of the site
Gain insights as to the perceived quality of the primary functions
Evaluate the usability of primary tasks
Identify general areas of confusion/clarity that could be further enhanced
Research + Discovery
We began our research by conducting a Heuristic Analysis which evaluated the site against a list of industry-standard design principles. This allowed us to identify key design violations early on in our process and focus our user research on assessing the severity of these issues in relation to the users ability to perform their key tasks. A short list of hypotheses were created from the analyses that we could use to test our findings against as we gathered more data.
- Increasing ease of navigation for primary tasks would strengthen users ability to discover and use member benefits -
- Improving feedback for important tasks like would increase user confidence of website and membership value -
- Increasing signal to noise ratio would help reduce short-term memory load of user trying to navigate this site -
- Increasing the general fidelity of site would increase confidence in non-members, increasing their likelihood to join -
To gain deeper insight into potential pain-points, we conducted 15 Usability Tests, 10 remote and 5 in-lab with participants both in and out of the mental health field.
We used Think Aloud Protocol, asking users to walk us through scenarios and and perform primary tasks on the site.
In-lab usability testing conducted at Fathom Consulting
Teamwork at Fathom Consulting
Define
Synthesizing Data
Data was organized using affinity diagramming to identify where the website was working and where users found pain points. From this I uncovered key themes to help frame a Findings and Recommendations report.
We found that...
● The sites greatest strength is the content it offers
● The sites greatest weakness is showing its users how to find and use that content
● Layout of the site generally met the expectations of those who work in the field but less so the people outside of the field
● All participants experienced unnecessary confusion at some point when performing key tasks
● The value of membership is not entirely clear to users and some did not immediately realize that they could become a member
Key themes
MAMFT is an interdependent community that relies on membership to realize its full potential. To ensure that potential is met, demonstrating the value of membership to users is essential to sustain and grow that community.
But not all of the site’s users are members. Demonstrating the value of the site to the public no only expands its legitimacy, it also falls in line with MAMFT’s long term plan to become more of a resource to the public
The greatest strength of the MAMFT site is the content and resources it provides to its users. Clarity in both visual design and user flow allows the user to spend more time benefiting from what the site has to offer and less time trying to find it.
A users confidence in the site correlates strongly with their ability to use the site. MAMFT depends on membership, as does the value of its site. Therefore, making sure users feel confident in their ability to use the site that facilitates achieving their goals is imperative.
I created a mock-up of a proposed change to the homepage which solves some common pain points we found that revolved around layered navigation bars, a distracting automatic carousel feature, and important buttons like “Join MAMFT” that somehow missed the gaze of the user.
Original MAMFT Website
Proposed redesign of homepage