Projects:

Bankers Almanac Website Redevelopment

"The usability studies undertaken by Usability by Design, confirmed our overall development strategy and assisted us in identifying modifications needed prior to re-launch."
Maureen Milne, Product Development Director.

Outline
Bankers Almananc is the leading banking industry source for information relating to banks and financial institutions. Improvements were being planned for the site, and we were commissioned to assist.

Critical Business Issues

Ease of use: Had to be easy to use, especially easier to use than the competitor sites.

Efficiency of use: Must be efficient and fast as it is used daily for common tasks.

Support for current users: As well as attracting new business, the new site must support existing users and not frustrate them or slow them down.

Usability Approach
Working closely with the Bankers Almanac project team, we carried out a series of usability tests, analysed the results and reported the issues back to Bankers Almanac.

Returns Realised
Follow-up research asked users to compare the Bankers Almanac website with its leading competitor:

74% of respondents prefered BankersAlmanac.com.

79% of respondents rated the site as 'Excellent' or 'Very good' overall.

The majority of existing users felt the new design was an improvement.

64% of users rated the site as 'Excellent' or 'Very good' on "Ease of finding what you are looking for", with a further 32% rating it as 'Fairly good'

Expert Evaluation of Wireframes and Graphic Designs

Before John Lewis launched their Greenbee website - which promotes their direct services including finance, travel insurance and shopping services – they wanted to ensure that the design would be user friendly.

John Lewis provided us with the wireframes and flat graphic design layouts of the proposed site for an expert evaluation.

A range of high, medium and low priority issues were identified which could then be addressed before the team went to the expense of building the site.

Travel Insurance Expert Evaluation

Following on from an earlier expert evaluation of Greenbee, John Lewis wished to assess the user-friendliness of the Travel Insurance section of the site, which had not been available previously.

A restricted-access version of the site was made available to our consultants and an evaluation was carried out according to our User Experience Rating system.

Several high, medium and low priority issues were identified which will be addressed before the system is made live.

Hand-held Scanner Evaluation

Background
John Lewis Partnership were trialling their new handheld scanner for customers in-store. The scanner allows users to scan items in the store, to create a list which can be stored and accessed online. Its main purpose is to allow the easy creation of gift lists for weddings, birthdays or other events.
John Lewis Partnership commissioned UbD to carry out an in-store usability evaluation of the device.

Our Approach
In collaboration with the John Lewis IT team, a consultant from UbD entered a John Lewis store posing as a customer and used the device to create a gift list. The consultant carried out all the tasks which an actual customer would, including returning the scanner to the store and viewing the list online. An in-store evaluation of the usability level of the device was made through-out.

Results
We reported back to the John Lewis Partnership with a number of usability issues relating to navigation design, screen layouts, terminology used, the Help function, and various other areas. These issues are being addressed in a new version of the interface software.

Extranet Card Sort Study and Focus Groups

Background
John Lewis Partnership were implementing an extranet to allow staff members to login from their home computers and access John Lewis information and functions.

The purpose of this study was to ascertain:

What functions and content staff would like included in an extranet

What “look-and-feel” they would like the extranet to have

How staff members would like information organised and presented on the extranet.

This information would also be used in a proposed future redevelopment of JLP’s intranet.

Our Approach
UbD ran a series of card sort studies and focus group discussions. A statistical cluster analysis was performed on the results of the card sort study.

Results
Based on the card sort and the focus groups we recommended a information architecture for the JLP extranet, showing how each content card would fit into that structure. Terminology was taken from the terms used by the participants in labelling their own groups and from the group discussions.
JLP adopted our recommended architecture and later reports stated that it was extremely well-received.