WIGG Lecture Series / Consulting Service

You got it! Nothing on campus can happen without a meeting. But we promise this one will be way more fun than most of them. You’ll meet with one or two from our liaison squad.

We’ll chat about your needs, your audience, your wildest hopes and dreams, and generally have a jolly good old time.

We’ll ask lots of questions and take lots of notes so that we can involve the rest of our team.

Gotcha again with the higher ed standards! Don’t worry, you won’t need to pull an all-nighter for these assignments.

Common assignments might include:

• Getting information on where your current site lives
• Content inventory worksheet
• Audience and content worksheet

Based on our convo and any homework we task you with, we’ll put our brains together to evaluate the best solution for your needs.

If campus has a solution for you, we’ll move forward with one of the following service offerings:

• Facilitated referral
• Usability testing
• Design, UX and information architecture strategy
• Full implementation engagement

Which campus resource is the right one for me? PIE? WIGG? UX? ITAL?

We get it. There are a ton of resources available for making your website work the way you need it to. Knowing which one is right for you isn’t your job; it’s ours.

When you make a system more usable, you reduce the frustration and exasperation experienced by the people working with it. The goal is a “friction-free” interface that doesn’t distract or hinder people from accomplishing goals.

Why that matters to web folks:

• Readers who struggle with text or a visualization may not understand your message or results clearly.
• Survey participants who struggle with an interface may be providing unconsciously skewed or inaccurate data-i.e., survey “1 to 5 / 5 to 1” problem.
• Content creators who struggle with a system may not be creating or capturing data in the same way as the people who developed it.

• Planning & design—Figuring out what you want to study and how to do it
• Implementation & Testing—Building something to use for your research and making sure it works as planned
  
• Data collection and/or Collaboration—You’ve got something built; now other people are using it along with you, but is everyone using it the same way?
  
• Presentation—You have results and need to share them, via publications, websites, interactive tools, apps …

The Classics

• Card sorting
  Ask a person to group cards into named categories.
  Their names: “Open” card sort.
  Your predefined names: “Closed” card sort.
• Observational studies
  Define a set of tasks you want someone to accomplish and watch them try to figure it out (ideally without the system designer or engineer in the meeting).

More Options

• Organizational research
• Competitive review
• Heuristic analysis
• Design standards
• Sketching / wireframing / prototypes
• A/B testing
• Information architecture analysis/Treejack
• BPMN workflow diagram
• More options at https://go.illinois.edu/uxcards

Setup

• We discuss what you want to learn from your assessments
  Card sorts, Treejack/Info Arch, and A/B comparisons have been useful.
• You gather email addresses for participants that match your desired audiences.
  Mailing lists are great.
• We work together to build and review the tests.
• You email the Optimal Workshop link(s) to your participants.

More Options

• Your participants fill out the assessments on their own time (no scheduling or rescheduling needed).
• Optimal Workshop immediately updates visualizations the minute the form is filled out.
• We can review the visualizations together, including analysis of what may have caused unexpected results.

Client: School of Social Work

Goal: Reorganize the global navigation

• Combine the Admissions and Academics into one menu
• Make some information more findable, e.g., PATH, CEU

Method: Treejack

• Card sorting vs Treejack: Card sorting is a form of discovery for navigation structure that allows us to understand how our users naturally categorize our resources. Treejack allows us to evaluate a proposed navigation structure to see if users can find key items.
• Treejack: UX research method used to assess the findability of resources after you have created your proposed navigation hierarchy. Task-based research method where you ask participants to look for key resources.

For preparation: two things

• First, the tree, or hierarchical menu, which will be displayed as a series of accordions that represent the site’s navigation categories, without any visual design or content
• Second, the tasks, or instructions that tell study participants what they should look for in the tree

The process of Treejack

1. The client prepares the tree in the Excel spreadsheet.
   
2. Working together with the client, we helped define the three groups of target audiences and created tasks for each of the groups.

Target audiences:

• Social work professionals
• Prospective students
• Current students

Tasks:

• Each task should test a category label by asking the user to find something contained within that category. For each task you write, we should also define the correct answer(s), corresponding to where the information is located within the tree.

• Avoid pattern matching in creating the task.

3. Choose the right platform. Input the information structure and the tasks into the platform and test with the potential users.

• Tool: Optimal Workshop

4. Review and analyze the data.

Provide a detailed report with the analyzed data and the proposed ways to help resolve the issues.

• Success rate
• Directness
• Time spent
• Selection frequencies
• First click
• Destination
• Pie tree

Process

• Email introduction
• Initial meeting
  • Grant access to WordPress & cPanel
  • Brief introduction of the webs
  • Align up with the goals, e.g., updates, backup and patch
• Field consulting team and the client work together

1. Facilitate a content audit
   Look for areas we can simplify content and any potential for new WIGG projects.
2. Conduct UX tests and analyze results to supply data-driven information architecture
   Clients gather participants for these surveys and make final decisions.
3. Migrate necessary content from the old website to the new website
   This process works regardless of CMS. A backup/archive will be saved.
4. 1:1 design advice / web component advising
   We help match your content to the best, university-supported tools available.
5. Provide documentation, training, and resources on maintenance, supported add-ons and backups.
6. Launch the site; 2 weeks of support

• Content creation or editing
• Photo/media procurement
• Content and media accessibility
  Meaning a manual evaluation of content to determine if a piece of text should be a heading or not, if an image should have alt text or be decorative, how to write alt text etc.
• Gathering user testing participants
• Marketing your website launch