Surfers Against Sewage, an ocean activism nonprofit based in the UK, has a flagship educational program called Plastic Free Schools that empowers schools to take action against plastic pollution. But despite having nearly 4,000 schools signed up, the engagement levels post-registration is low.
They needed help to identify barriers to participation and improve engagement with the education program, which is vital to the organization’s core mission to create ocean activists. I was enlisted to conduct a usability audit of the online platform that powers the educational program for schools. I provided this service to the organization pro bono.
Services provided: UX Audit
My approach
I conducted an audit of the website using Jakob’s 10 Usability Heuristics as my usability evaluation criteria.
I navigated the site as a user would, documenting all my steps as screenshots in a Miro board.
I documented the usability issues I found and recommendations for solutions, along with a summary of my findings.
Results
I found 12 usability issues on the website, 10 of which were related to user engagement.
To help the organization prioritize some quick wins, I identified the top 3 areas that are impacting user engagement for the organization to focus their efforts on. I also broke down the recommendations to solutions they could implement now, with a lower investment in time and resources, and in solutions to implement later in future, with a greater investment.
Here’s what I delivered to the organization:
- A report of usability issues impacting user engagement on the Plastic Free Schools website and recommendations on how to fix them, prioritized by their impact on engagement and feasibility to implement.
- Visual documentation of the website’s user experience in a Miro board, organized by task (setting a password, completing an objective, uploading files, etc.).
- A slide deck to help gain internal buy-in to fund the recommended improvements.
Testimonial
“What an absolute star you are! We have got so much out of your support, we honestly couldn’t have wished for more. I am going to share the presentation with the team this week and, most importantly, the recommendations. I can see how your work will really help us to re-engage our existing schools and to ensure the journey is far easier for those yet to join. I would also like to thank you for your clarity and organisation; your presentation and accompanying documents have been excellent!”
Lara Jeffries, Education Manager
Surfers Against Sewage
How you can achieve similar results
- Go through the registration or sign up process on your website as a new user would and make note of the places where you get stuck, frustrated, or confused.
- Anything that behaves unexpectedly on your website is a good place to investigate further. Investigating might look like asking a few of your users about it, sending a survey to a larger group of users, and/or digging into analytics data to learn more.
- If you have a password generator on your website that helps users create secure account passwords, confirm that the passwords it generates meets your website’s password requirements (not just strength, but character, number, and symbol requirements, too).
- If users need to access your site relatively infrequently (maybe once a month or less often), consider offering a passwordless login option. Users will get a “magic login link” in their email instead of having to keep a password on your website.
- If your users need to upload photos on your website, ensure the technology you use makes good use of native mobile device features so that users can easily select and upload multiple photos directly from their phones.