The Baltimore Museum of Art is a popular museum in the Maryland area that is known for its beautiful art pieces. Along with its art pieces, its website also reflects how nice the museum is. However, I was wondering if its aesthetics matches its usability. Going through the website, processes such as reserving a ticket and finding information were particularly difficult and were elements that I wanted to evaluate more.
Project Overview
Type
Graduate Project, Heuristic Evaluation, Moderated Usability Test
Team
Tien Tran, Adnan Husain
Timeframe
12 Weeks
Tools
Figma, Zoom
Heuristic Evaluation
The first step in our process of evaluating the usability of the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) website was to perform a heuristic review. Specifically, Jakob Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics was used to analyze the website. As part of this process, I highlighted potential issues with the website that I wanted to evaluate, marked them in terms of severity, and provided recommendations on how to fix the issues found.
Personas
Once I got a deeper understanding of the inner workings of the website, I worked with my partner, Adnan, to build user personas to understand the different types of users that would use the website. Drawing from personal experience and a Museum Audience Report from 2018, we created three user personas (the student, the member, and the visitor) that best represent the types of people visiting museums. Specifically, I created the art enthusiast and collaborated on the art student personas.
Task Analysis
After personas were created, Adnan and I performed a hierarchical task analysis where we identified high-level tasks and decomposed them into a hierarchy of sub-tasks. For our particular website, aside from purchasing an entrance ticket, our tasks were largely around finding specific pieces of information.
Test Plan
Once all task analysis was complete and we created the ideal path and scenarios, Adnan and I created a test plan that we could use when we perform usability tests with participants. The test plan is shown below:
Conducting the Test
A total of three usability tests were conducted as part of this project (two virtually over Zoom and one in-person). In each test we had the participants work through the website as they would normally use it to get a better understanding of how other people use the website. After each scenario, we presented the participants with a mood-o-meter to get their reactions to completing the scenario’s tasks. For this project I was the moderator for two tests and a note-taker for the remaining test.
Analysis
After all the tests were complete, we analyzed the quantitative and qualitative data. Qualitative data was recorded in Google Docs and quantitative data was recorded in Google Sheets. To analyze qualitative data we looked at what participants were saying throughout the test and seeing their reactions when they ran into roadblocks during the task. Aside from analyzing qualitative data, I analyzed quantitative data by taking averages based on task completion, success rate, and satisfaction rankings.
Recommendations
As part of our final deliverable for this project, we created a report that was aimed at stakeholders of the BMA website. In this presentation we highlighted our general process and gave recommendations to our findings from the usability tests.
Outcomes
Overall, going through the process of conducting a usability test from scratch was worth it. Being interested particularly in usability, this project holds a lot of value to me. Through this process able to learn how to perform various activities such as heuristic evaluations, persona development, task analysis, and actually conducting usability tests with real participants. I definitely ran into challenges with being a moderator and note-taker for the tests, but it was a great learning experience. Adnan was an amazing partner, and the experience was very fun!