User Research
As the UX designer on the project I wanted to understand who the users were and what their goals and pain points of the current website was. My first step was to go into Google Analytics to get some basic quantitative data on the users, where are they based, what pages are they going to, are they accessing the site on desktop/tablet or mobile etc.
After getting some basic quantitative data I wanted to get a fuller picture of who the users are by getting some qualitative data. I was supplied a spreadsheet of businesses who signed up to Digital Tourism Scotland emails and also of businesses who have previously attended Digital Tourism Scotland workshops. I sent out a survey with questions to get an understanding of what the user’s digital knowledge is like right now, what stops them from attending workshops and reading articles online about digital marketing. Also asked them what subjects in Digital Marketing are they most interested in and want to learn more.
Digital Tourism Scotland survey sent out to local businesses
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Digital Tourism Scotland Persona – Barry the busy
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Personas
From the quantitative and qualitative data gathered earlier, I have now built a full picture of who the users are and their goals and pain points. It was clear to see that there were two main personas –
- A user who did not have much time because they are too busy doing the day to day running of their business and only had a small amount of time. This type of user preferred to be taught in a workshop like environment and to be able to ask questions.
- A user that did not mind going online reading articles or watching videos online.
Information Architecture
The new Information Architecture was created after the personas, working with the SEO Executive, doing keyword research, I also sent out another survey with a tree testing exercise to see if users know exactly how to do the main user tasks –
- Book workshops
- Read articles
Digital Tourism Scotland Invision prototype
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Prototyping
With the wifreframes created in Axure, I created a interactive prototype and went out to some of the users that filled in the previous surveys and conducted usability testing with the wireframes. After analysing the usability testing sessions, some of the users said that even though all of the users scrolled to the bottom of each article to see how long the article was, they said that they were not sure if they had time to read the whole article and that they would like to know how long each article was. I went into Axure and created amends to the wireframes, but instead of testing them with the user, the designer and myself went into Photoshop to created the high fidelity designs for each of the pages. Once the high fidelity designs were created, I went into Invision to link all the pages together. There were two Invision prototypes, a desktop version and a mobile
Usability Testing
Once the high fidelity designs were created I went back to the users that did the wireframe usability testing but also other users who had completed the survey to do usability testing.
Digital Tourism Scotland usability testing with a user
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Results
In the old site, the average time a user spent on a article was 1:12 seconds and with the new site the average time spent on an article page is 2:57 seconds. Sign up to workshops has increased by 69%.
View live project
Picture of Digital Tourism Scotland website on a macbook pro and a iphone 11
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