Work in small groups to run a paper prototyping exercise. Map a User Journey to an article within Stuff.co.nz and then produce the necessary paper prototypes of the pages the user must go through to get to the article. Consider the user journey and if it can be made better/easier by making changes to the website.
N.B. Tracking the user journey means taking note of:
- The pages that the user goes through to get to the article – eg. home page > sports category page > article page
- The elements that they interact with the navigate to the article – eg. used search bar, used navigation menu, clicked button, moved slider
- The location of these elements on the page – are all the interactions happening at the top of the page?
- What visual cues are you as the reader looking for while trying to find the article. You might find it helpful to talk aloud, describing what you are doing while interacting with the site. eg. “I am looking for the sport category now” or “I am scanning the page to find a part of the title text that I recognise”.
User Journey:
Stuff.co.nz Homepage > National category through a button on the navigation bar > Health section through a button on the secondary navigation bar > The article page
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/77372065/cellphones-blamed-for-rise-in-text-neck-injuries-among-teenagers
Our group = Lauren, Lani, Corina, and me
We created paper prototypes of each website page so the user could complete the journey to the article. We also drew pages for where we were going to change the user journey.
Original User Journey:
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Alternate User Journey (Using Search Bar):
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We then tried to look at the task using each of the user personae and decide if we thought they would be able to find the article. While trying to troubleshoot our process and think if there were any other possible user journeys, I decided that to look for an article about getting a sore neck while texting I would actually look under the 'Technology' and then 'Digital Living' headings. Surprisingly when looking under the 'Digital Living' section we found that the article was actually in that section as well as the health section - so there were two ways to get to the same article.
Alternate User Journey (Looking under a different section):
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We then tried to think of how we could make the user journey to our particular article simpler. We all agreed that we thought the 'Health' section was very hidden in the 'National' category - who would actually look under that heading for Health stories. We think that it would be better situated under the 'Life & Style' section, or even just in the main navigation bar as its own category.
Two Possible Changes:
We then had Tristam test our prototype by asking him to find an article about how texting gives you a sore neck. His journey was: Homepage > Clicked on 'Technology' heading in the navigation bar > He went to scroll to find the article but we didn't have that feature > Clicked on 'Digital Living' section in the secondary navigation bar (for this section) > He clicked on the article headline and it took him to the article page (this page was under the 'Health' section). He expressed surprise that he had automatically moved from the 'Digital Living' to the 'Health' section without being told that was happening - perhaps something to consider in our own projects (having an indication of some sort to tell the user that they've entered a new category).
This task brought up interesting ideas of where users expect topics to be and how articles can relate to more than one section within the website.
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