Auditing IS&T

Project Overview

As part of a team, I helped to redesign and recreate the Information Systems and Technology -IS&T- website for Utah Valley University. As part of this redesign, I took the lead on creating a site map that would include how pages led to and from each other, if they had links that led to other pages, and any design flaws or usability issues that were present that my team could be aware of when we created the new design. This project was influential in how we progressed with the rest of the project, influencing what user research we conducted, what content we included and excluded, and how we would organize the new site.

Backstory

One of the classes I took at Utah Valley University gave me the opportunity to help with the redesign of the UVU's Information Systems and Technology website. While working on this project, I was put onto a small team where we collaborated with the stakeholders from that department to come up with the best website for their problem. While beginning work on this project, we realized that we needed to conduct a site audit to help us better understand what we were working with as well as know where the stakeholders were coming from.

Problem Statement

Understanding the content, structure, and functionality of the website was crucial in knowing how to proceed with the redesign. We hypothesized that having a site map would help us gain some insight in these issues as well as help us discover significant user experience issues even before conducting user testing.

Project Role

Developer, Team Member

Finding the Solution

In order to solve our problem of not having much understanding of the then-current content, structure, and functionality of the website, we started to create a basic web map of the IS&T website. We decided to use excel due to both the simplicity and its ability to easily filter by different things.

Because the IS&T website links to lots of different websites, degree pages, pdf files, and more, we knew that it would be too time consuming to conduct a site audit by manually looking through each page. So, I created a simple four line script to pull every link found in a href from every a tag that we could then put into excel to easily manipulate and conduct the site audit. Not only did this allow us to be sure we got every link, but it also helped us quickly find dead links and filter out external links that were not relevant to the project. Once the script was used on every internal page we could find, we had the groundwork done to conduct a more detailed analysis of the website.

With that ground work completed, we went through each page and evaluated it, looking at both things we liked and disliked about the pages design, noting missing or dead links, and adding other comments relevant to the specific page. Through this assessment, we found a multitude of errors, which ranged from design inconsistencies to usability issues. Because we were able to document our findings on each page, not only did we find some overarching patterns but we were also able to note things that could easily be improved that might have caused problems later in the design process if we hadn't.

Outcome

Our website audit helped us to gain a better understanding of the content on the website, to make informed decisions, and better plan how we would strategically tackle the project. It also helped us to identify usability issues early on so that our user testing could be more focused and provide better results. We were also able to use the analysis we got from the audit to inform stakeholders how we would like to proceed, what we believed major issues could be, and what we would be focusing on for user testing.

Reflection

Looking back on how this site analysis influenced our entire project, I've gained a deep appreciation for thorough planning and making sure things are done right. This approach helped to enhance our understanding of the website's content, know what next steps should be taken and how, and most importantly helped us both to understand shareholder concerns and desires, as well as approach them with more confidence. However, because I have seen how it had impacted our future work, If I was to do it again I would like to spend more time in the process to take notes about what other content might be on the page, such as images.