Brand Guide Usability Study

Context and background

ASU’s different departments and organizations refer to the ASU Official Brand Guide for information and guidelines on color, typography, fonts, photography, language, tone, web standards and much more. The brand guide website was relaunched in July 2021 in accordance to new ASU Brand Standards. After the relaunch, many users of the site noted that they have struggled to find specific information on the brand guide site. ASU’s Enterprise Marketing Hub manages the brand guide, so they were tasked with coming up with a solution to these struggles.

Research goal

The goal is to understand why users are struggling to find specific information on the brand guide site and to learn more about the information they would like to see on the site then display findings to provide stakeholders of the website with knowledge to make necessary changes that improve the experience of the brand guide.

My role

My role was data analysis, usability test planning and facilitation, test note taking, and formulation of insights and reccomendations. I worked with a team of 3 other researchers with 1 research manager overseeing us. All 3 of my colleagues focused on different aspects of the website to analyze data from. The area of data analysis I focused on was issues with social media on the brand guide.

Approach

Conduct a survey to...

understand common issues from a large pool of brand guide users
understand what users would like to see in the brand guide

Conduct usability tests and interviews to...

discover deeper insights from users of the brand guide about their issues built upon surveys
observe users encountering issues with the brand guide

Synthesize data into insights to..

to create recommendations to inform design solutions to improve the usability of the application.

Surveys

A survey was created in order to understand how many users were having issues on the site, what difficulties users are experiencing, and improvements then could be made to improve the brand guide. The google forms survey received 41 responses from ASU employees who are users of the brand guide. The survey participants were recruited through email.

Users who experienced difficulty

56% of users said they have difficulty finding information on the brand guide

Difficulty rating

3.3 out of 5

56% of users said they have difficulty finding information on the brand guide

To synthesize, each team member coded issues from survey responses that were similar and grouped them together. After grouping each team member developed insights individually.

Synthesis of Qualitative Insights Revealed...

Users feel that information is all scattered among different pages.
The analysis show that many users visit the brand guide on a weekly basis and many of those users struggled to find information within the writing style guide.
Many users requested search functionality of the brand guide site and more information on different topics.

Tests

7 moderated usability tests were conducted over a period of two days on usertesting.com . Survey participants were contacted through email and 7 agreed to participate in the test. Users scheduled times to meet through usertesting.com’s platform. These participants are ASU employees from these backgrounds:

3 Web Specialists/Designers
2 Communication Specialists
1 Marketing Specialist
1 Graphic Designer

During each usability testing session, one team mate recorded click path, one recorded notes and quotes, and one moderated the test. The team mates rotated for each of the 7 sessions. I moderated 2 sessions.

Users were to complete 8 tasks which were formulated based off of the most commonly used/ hardest to use aspects of the brand guide from our survey insights.

Task Examples

You are working on a section of a website and you need photos of students studying at the Polytechnic campus.

Find an image of students studying at the Polytechnic campus.

You are designing a social media post and want to see if your design can be copyrighted.

Find ASU’s policies for copyright protection.

Task Examples

Some pre and post test questions were shaped by the test participants survey responses. For instance, if the participant described a problem they had with the brand guide in the survey, they were asked to elaborate on that problem by the moderator. Here are example test questions from a web specialist:

Pre test

“ I saw that you had trouble with finding web content guidelines on the Brand Guide from the survey, can you elaborate on that?”

Post test

“If you had a magic wand how would you improve finding web content and logos on the brand guide?”

Test data synthesis

Click paths, notes, quotes, success, pass, or fail, and interpretation of difficulty for each task and user were put side by side to develop insights. I focused on the insights generation of the social media related tasks.

Overall findings

Overall results showed that improvements in site navigation and content organization would help users find information more easily.

Insights and issue examples

When searching for information, users do not immediately look into or use the sidebar navigation. Instead they scroll through the page for information first.

The Training and Tools menu is missing links to Web-related resources causing users to get lost when looking for web training and other items.

Finding the Widen login link from the logos page is confusing.

Deliverables

We compiled our analysis into a google slides report aimed towards the designers and developers of the website as well as other stakeholders. The report focused on general insights as well as insights for specific areas of the brand guide that were tested. The report was organized by each area of the site that was tested. The purpose of the report is to inform design decisions to make the brand guide more usable.

Recommendation examples

Next steps

The next steps are for designers and other stakeholders to make informed decisions armed with data and recommendations. This will lead to improvements in the usability of the brand guide, and hopefully result in less complaints in finding information.

Lessons learned

One of the biggest challenges of doing this usability study was the fact that the brand guide has so much content and pages. We remedied this by compartmentalizing insights into sections like social media, web content, ect. This helped keep the direction of the results from being completely disconnected from each other.