My roles: user researcher, information architect, UX designer, UX writer.
My task was to find out why completing training was hard, and then to solve the problems I uncovered. Working in partnership with another researcher, I planned studies to uncover why staff thought signing up for courses was difficult, and ran activities to uncover how users individually conceptualized course concepts. I was also responsible for coming up with a new way to organize and label courses that better matched user needs. We discovered user needs, suggested changes to meet those needs, and confirmed the changes worked.
I discovered user needs via usability tests and card sorts.
To understand potential issues, first I conducted an expert review to familiarize myself with learning system processes. Then the other researcher and I conducted 5 moderated usability test sessions to directly observe pain points in course sign-up journeys (I took notes and they moderated). After we discovered problems with how courses were organized and labeled, I moderated a qualitative open card sort and ran a quantitative unmoderated open card sort. The card sorts helped me understand how users conceptualized course topics and why they believed certain courses were related or not related to others. (I piloted all of our usability tests and card sorts.)
For the open card sorts, users organized training courses into groups they came up with.
I translated users' needs into a solution by creating a new classification schema for courses.
By assessing common course topic pairings, names of groups, and confusion around current course titles and finding content, I gained an understanding of what would be more intuitive to users. The card sorts and usability tests helped inform a new draft of a course classification schema. After drafting a few and discussing with the other researcher, and after reviewing with a couple of training center subject matter experts (to make sure I understood the course concepts myself), I conducted unmoderated closed card sorts to confirm the intuitiveness of the schemaI created. For those card sorts I recruited 50 users each, iterating the schema once after the 1st closed card sort revealed some confusion with a couple of course labels. Then I ran a 2nd closed card sort with 50 other users and confirmed the schema was intuitive. Users were able to successfully sort 98% of concepts within a couple of minutes.
This screenshot depicts how the card sort concepts were paired with other concepts, by users. You can see a pattern developing for 4-5 course groups.
I made sure the schema worked by doing more usability tests.
The other researcher and I then worked with the content system manager for the training team to update course classification and homepage layout in the training web portal. We conducted iterative usability test sessions with 12 participants, and were able to demonstrate the last iteration worked well for users, which had a 100% task success rate and a lot of unsolicited feedback from participants about how much easier it was to use the training system.