UX Case Study: Assessing National Geographic Expeditions Website
Overview
I’ve received a brief from National Geographic Expeditions to assess their desktop website and see if anything can be improved. What follows is my assessing process, that I went through to further understand how users will interact with the site, using a client’s provided Persona, as well as my own engagement experience with it.
Users & Audience
Since the client have provided me with the Persona that I should be using to assess the site, I didn’t really had to find out or research about who is the user or who is the primary audience of the site.
Roles & Responsibilities
Being an only UX Designer who have worked on this project, I was a one-man operation responsible for everything: from Heuristic Evaluation of the site, all the way to the design of new/revised sitemap for the Primary Menu.
Scope & Constraints
The timeframe for the project ran from November 5th, 2019 (getting the assignment) to November 12 (submitting the completed documentation to the stakeholders). During 7 days of this very tight deadline, I was able to complete multiple card sorts with users, analyze the data, do a heuristic evaluation of a site and etc.
I did not have a budget for this project.
The only roadblock that happened to be in my way was the very limited amount of days allowed for this.
Process
To start on the project I had to complete a Heuristic Evaluation of the site using a client’s provided Persona.
Meet Jayse. He is a an Investment Advisor that works at a large bank in Manhattan, NY. While he is a very busy person, he loves to travel to experience new adventures, learn about local culture and people and have fun trying new things! His goal is to find a unique trip that can work with his busy schedule.
Using Jayse I went through the site, as he would on his regular day of booking vacations. I’ve visited Home Page, People & Culture page, Japan: Hiking and Cultural Adventure and Trip Information page that is part of Reservation process.
During the evaluation process I realized that there are some technical and SEO/SEM issues that current site has and nobody seem to be bothered by: there is a padding bug on the home page for one of the bottom sections that seem to be out of place, as well as none of the images had Alt tags assigned to them, so all these images that a site has will not be read by screen readers (for people with disabilities). Also, most of the issues I had, were also had to due with being accessible to the users. You can see more of explanations if you click any of the images above.
Information Architecture
Right after the Heuristic Evaluation I’ve created a sitemap that showed all items within the Primary Menu and how users find some of the items on it to be confusing. For example, there is a menu item called Private within Trip Types category. Right next to it is an item called Private Jet. Why won’t these two items be within the same item name? To see what exactly is Private, you have to click on it and it will bring you to the actual page — Private Expeditions. Primary Menu uses MegaMenu functionality for the layout of dropdown and it has real estate to put another work right next to the word Private. So why this wasn’t done right in the first place? You can see the current site sitemap on the left of this text.
Current Site User Flow
Below you will find the breakdown of how Jayse should be interacting with the site to proceed through necessary steps to complete booking a trip.
Open Card Sort / Closed Card Sort
Once the current Sitemap and User Flow were completed I’ve wrote down all 41 menu items that are within the site on index cards and went through an Open Card Sort with 5 participants face to face.
Here are the 5 of these results:
Similar group names that were discovered during this phase were: All Destinations, Regions, Locations. They all are very similar to current Destinations menu category. Most of the users not ever seeing current site took cards that mention locations and continents under any of these category names.
Some people thought that items such as Private Expeditions (I wrote that actual name on the card), Private Jet, Signature Land Expeditions and so on belong in some what more “Premium” category, or how one of the participants called it — “Treat Yourself”. This was an interesting observation, because on the current site they are within 2 different group label names under Trip Types menu category.
Two of the users added all water related items to one group name that is related to water activities/trips. There is no separation for that on current site.
After analyzing data from Open Card Sort, I’ve completed a Close Card Sort. During this phase, I’ve shorten the number of Primary Menu items from 4 to 3 and renamed the menu items that were confusing to the participants originally. You can find the breakdown of whole process below.
Revised Sitemap for the National Geographic Expeditions Site
With the Card Sorts done, I’ve created a revised Sitemap that showed the proposed updates to the menu based on Open and Closed Sorts. You can see it below in my presentation slide.
Outcome
After the submission of the project to the stakeholders was completed, I will be waiting on the feedback from them on how to implement these changes and probably do more of in-depth work on the site. Overall it’s a very solid site, but there are some more things site can improve on.
Next Steps
- Wait for feedback from stakeholders
- Apply feedback to the current site and see what other areas can be improved
- See if any other functionalities on the site can be useful to the users (both new and dedicated)
Leanings:
Improving the site is a continuous process. Technology goes ahead every day, as well as how we get/read/process information via outlets that we use on daily or at least occasionally. Every site can be improved every day. It’s the matter of how, why and how much will it cost to the client.
Where did the project leave off?
Project was left off at sending the whole assess process to the client and waiting for feedback from them.
“Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow. But any action is better than no action at all.” — Norman Vincent Peale
