Managing user literacy for improved UX with usability testing
@Above and Beyond Family Recovery Center
In order to ensure the resume creation tool we created in MyReBuiltLife would be effective with particular stakeholder's clients who had long term substance abuse disorders, low literacy and low technology adoption rates, we needed to establish a clear view of what impediments did the clients have when accessing the tools, address those impediments and re-test usability until our statistical user goals were met.
Background and Goals
Above and Beyond serves people with addiction in an out patient intensive program designed to reduce harm, thus mitigating the guilt and shame addicts can feel during their recovery process. Given that the user base therapeutically demands positive experiences that lift the client up, we had to determine whether the tone, user journey and literacy levels on our site were adequate for inclusion in the curriculum at Above and Beyond, which has become a hallmark for addiction care and treatment in the United States.
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We worked with 8 groups of 3 users each during our testing sessions.
Foundational Research Goals
1. Determine how AnB users respond to existing user flows and processes.
2. Identify and correct any impediments to AnB user's functional usage of site.
3. Validate AnB client experience satisfaction and present quantitative results on goals to AnB staff.
Design Research Goals
I1. Implement any features, re-designs that ease user flow and comprehension without adding weight
2. Adjust site data gathering to accommodate homeless users
3. Create validated improvements that benefit all users
Methods
To establish our baseline, we had the AnB users participate in task analysis demonstrating their basic understanding of the web site followed up with in depth interviews to explore the points where our users encountered difficulty. Once established, our design team created solutions and we conducted A/B testing to expose the user's preferred solution before implementation.
Crucial Insights
Once we identified the user pain points, we made improvements to text, user flow, buttons and colors to create a more clarified process for our less experienced and less literate technology users at AnB, and were able to validate their ease of use to the director of AnB and his staff with quantitative research results.
We had originally planned on using the participant observation method to determine the sites effectiveness for the AnB users but quickly realized that many of them were accessing the toolbox in crowded, and often noisy settings, making observation a challenge so we switched to a more controlled environment and performed task analysis on users to determine initial usability and then to validate the modifications on the back end of the process to prove project success.
Knowledge Takeaways
1. Most web sites do not serve homeless users very effectively
2. Scheduling twice as many people per session would have mitigated the consistent no-shows.
3. Users have different frustration levels you have to identify
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