Museum Computer Network is a community dedicated to empowering GLAM professional’s technology needs. MCN has held a successful yearly conference since 1967. In an effort to support its users year round, a member portal was launched in June 2021.
MCN hired a team of four UX researchers to evaluate the usability of the member portal. Moderated usability testing was conducted with a focus on MCN members ability to find people, information and navigate the portal. While providing resources appreciated by users, we discovered four main areas to improve the users capacity to engage with the site.
We met with our MCN representative, Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli via Zoom. We had the chance to discuss MCN and its mission in great detail. Through discussing MCN’s goals as an organization, along with the desired functionality of the members portal we identified areas of the site that would become the focus of our usability testing.
"[MCN] shouldn't just be a conference where we get together for three days, once a year. We need to come up with a better system for people to be able to support each other throughout the year." - Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli, MCN Senior Digital Strategist
Remote moderated user testing was chosen as our test method. We were able to collect qualitative and quantitative data including observations during testing. During this phase, we generated all materials needed for running a remote moderated usability session. Materials included a recruitment screener, consent form, tasks and scenarios for participants to complete, session script, and pre and post test questionnaires.
Since the test sessions took place in real time with a moderator we had the ability to ask questions of our participants behavior while it was occurring.
It was important that our participants were MCN members with an active account to test the members only features.
Recruitment screeners were distributed to MCN members via email by our client rep Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli.
The recruitment screener included 6 questions regarding participant's background with MCN, their technology expertise and willingness to participate in the study.
There were no standard MCN users. They are men and women of all ages working in the GLAM sector.
We distributed a pre-test questionnaire to all recruited participants to understand their site usage. This questionnaire included 5 short answer questions. A large portion of MCN members were accessing (or attempting to access) the site for professional resources. This made understanding and improving the usability of the member portal an important task for MCN to deliver an enjoyable and easy to use experience for its users.
To prepare the test protocol, we focused on creating tasks that would help inform us of where the users were navigating and how users utilized the site's resources. Each participant was asked to imagine themselves in a scenario and complete four tasks on their desktop browser. We asked them to think aloud during the usability sessions to understand their full thought process and reaction to what was occurring on the site. Task 2 was followed by four questions relating to the task.
“You are hoping to transition to a job in digital imaging and looking to find out more about the field. You joined MCN to gather information and make contacts within digital imaging.”
We recruited 11, scheduled 9 and ran 8 test sessions with participants over Zoom. These sessions were attended by a moderator and notetaker. All sessions were recorded for analysis.
We gathered insights such as navigation paths taken during tasks, task success rate and decided a severity rating for the issue. Our participants also provided feedback during a post test questionnaire. By taking a close look at our participants actions and feedback we were able to pinpoint our user’s struggles with the site.
After analyzing data from all 8 participants, we zeroed in on three repeating behaviors that arose during testing that related to our original research questions. We felt that improving these issues would make for a more enjoyable experience while using the members portal and be vital to continuing MCN’s mission as an organization.
Our users had trouble finding members by specific criteria. This was due to the lack of information upfront to indicate details about member’s backgrounds. As a result, users attempted to use the search bar. Our users felt the results returned via the search bar were not helpful.
How to improve these issues:
Our users expressed a preference for using email to contact other members, and for other members to contact them. Emails were not readily available on member’s profiles. The only contact information available were social media links and the option for a personal website link. On occasion there was zero contact information on user’s profiles.
Users expressed hesitation for using social media to make a professional contact and continued searching for an email address, which became a difficult and frustrating task.
How to improve these issues:
There are two navigation paths towards the SIG landing pages. Either via the “Member” tab or the “Community” tab. Each page appears different, but provides the same functionality. One was text heavy and hard to scan for information. The other, image heavy and disorienting.
How to improve these issues:
Users had difficulty understanding they needed to subscribe to a Special Interest Group (SIG) in order to access all its features. Our user’s also expressed a desire to search the posts for specific content, like subject matter and job postings. Interestingly, when asked to make changes to notification and subscription preferences, users attempted to make these changes directly in the SIG board, rather than in their account settings.
How to improve these issues:
When logging in, members expected to land on a public view of their profile page but were disoriented to find themselves on an instructional page with information about their account and member resources. Once they navigated to their profile, they were brought to a page with input fields. Many users thought the area was simply backend information for MCN and did not realize it was the public information displayed on their profiles.
How to improve these issues:
We learned from our pre-test questionnaire that the majority of users logged in once a month, or once in sixth months. Users also voiced difficulty remembering what posts they had made and any replies to their posts.
How to improve these issues:
When diving deeper into managing their account settings, tasks such as opting in and out of SIG notifications and subscriptions were found in two separate tabs of their profile, which caused confusion and uncertainty around their actions.
How to improve these issues:
"This is amazing work! I’m...really thrilled to have fresh eyes [on the site]" - Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli, MCN Senior Digital Strategist
We presented our findings to our client via Zoom. They were impressed with the work, both the insights from the usability session and recommendation mockups. We presented 13 recommendations and were asked to list the top three fixes MCN should focus on. We suggested updating the member directory filters and search function, users ability to send emails from the site and finally landing members on the public view of their profile when logging in.
We did learn during our presentation that MCN is hosted on a wordpress site and some of our recommendations were not possible based on the site's functionality. While our client was thrilled with the results we delivered, we did brainstorm some low effort fixes for several of our recommendations that would be easily implemented on a wordpress site. In hindsight, it would have been useful to have discussed this during our kickoff.
I would recommend the next steps on this project would be to learn the capabilities of the site that MCN is hosted on in order to modify our recommendations.
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