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Home My Public Portal About2018-06-14 working group Website User Testing Report May.21.2018 Watertown Website User Testing Report Data collected by residents of Watertown May 21 , 2018 Report prepared by CL Tian, new website user testing project coordinator, 3 year Watertown resident, 10+ years experience in web development, founder of PINKOA, a digital agency with web development services. Summary We are committed to Watertown thriving, and by extension, are interested in a website that supports the needs of residents and properly represents our town. In the spirit of an open dialog and collaboration with the town staff and the marketing committee, a group of citizens of Watertown gathered and voluntarily participated in the user testing of the new Watertown website by CivicPlus. The overall findings of the project is that the new website is average (3.3 on a scale of 1 easy to 5 difficult) in ease of navigation/usability the finding of the user groups. Of importance to address pre-launch/immediately post-launch are a few tasks that had a high rate of incompletion (sign up for emergency notifications and finding old town minutes), misspellings, and 404 pages/broken links. A learning curve is expected with any new website launch. As such, many expressed that it was more difficult than expected to find what they needed and understand the logic of link placements. Whether these challenges are attributable solely to user education or point to a deeper design issue remains to be seen in the coming months. Our findings conditionally support launching the website according to the timeline with assurances that 1) functionality issues outlined below will be addressed; 2) responsive issues will be fixed by CivicPlus per page 2 of the contract "CivicPlus Redesign Project Deliverables - New responsive design." and 3) either the town or CivicPlus remedy broken links in a timely manner. This report created using data from testing that was conducted between Friday, May 11, 2018 to Monday, May 14, 2018 and publicly available documents about this project such as the CivicPlus proposal and meeting minutes. 1 User Testing Tasks All users were asked to conduct a series of common tasks on the website, provide qualitative feedback on their experience navigating the website on a variety of devices, and give examples of bugs. The technical user group was asked more specific questions about providing navigation paths. Common Tasks • Sign up for Emergency Alerts • Find payment page for Real Estate Tax • Find payment page for License • Find payment page for Certificates • Submit request for service • Sign up for Updates • Find job board and download an application • Find contact info of town manager • Find old minutes from a meeting • View property info Qualitative Feedback Questions • Please provide more detail about any tasks you could not complete • How easy was it to find what you needed overall? (non-technical only) • How easy was it to navigate the website? Testing Groups Website testing feedback was submitted 15 times (7 by non-technical; 8 by technical). Non-technical users are individuals in Watertown who have no particular experience in web development. Technical users are individuals in Watertown who have experience with web development projects either managing them as a work project and/or developing websites/managing teams who develop website projects. 2 Non-Technical Technical Device Browser Chrome Chrome Safari Safari *Flrefox Firefox Internet Explorer Microsoft Edge Device ■Desktop Tablet* p /Laptop Aga *Tablet �Tablet S mar[phone !Smartphone Website Feedback How easy was the website to navigate? Average is 3.3 on a scale of 1 easy to 5 difficult. Non-Technical Technical (1 easy to 5 difficult) z ou 1 2 3 4 5 2 3 4 3 Qualitative Feedback Positive/Neutral Negative Design: Mobile Experience • It looks nice except for the position of • Much more cumbersome to use web "translation" which is half a line above app from phone. "site tools" which looks kind of weird. • Clunky as is not an interface primarily • Nice simple design. designed for smaller screens, but • OK manageable. • When shrinking window on a laptop, the icons and text overlap-don't scale properly, and when footer menus User Experience • The content buckets for the main nav are unclear. • Online payments being listed under city services is not obvious. Specific Recommendations Based on the data from the user testing, we conditionally support the launch of the new website. We request the following functionality be resolved prior to launch or with a specific post-launch go live plan given the importance or prominence: Functionality o Make it easier to find Sign up for Emergency Alerts E@3y = h:ledium Di�i-_jlt Incomplete 3 1 n 4 User feedback: There is something wrong with the emergency alert link. It's relatively easy to find (although you have to scroll down) but it doesn't take you straight to the emergency alerts but to the overall news flash. FYI, after searching around that page I was able to find emergency alerts, but it took me forever to figure it out. Emergency alerts takes you to news and announcements. You have to go to the bottom of the page to find Notify Me and sign up for emergency alerts from there. That wouldn't be so bad except there is a huge link to "Emergency Watertown Alerts" and you would expect it to take you directly to the Watertown Alerts. o Fix the search function Example: Searching "Department of Public Works" ,}to wzmatertown.ma.Ls i earch?sea rchPhrase=department+oi+public+works 1Pad• x -•,a 100%. Dnhne. Town of Watertown 0 Search --- Responsiveness o Fix button placement on home page at smaller screen widths W'AT r'!'ouuded in l'eureW TF:6n/V Residents Business Government City Services Visitors Haw Dul... WA 1 / ILIO[iL</iYrLLd e • O !'m Seaichmg For. Q I'm Searching For._ L Q (mobile and ipad view) 5 Links o Have post-launch plan to fix all broken links We understand that during the pre-launch period, there may be broken links between staging environment and live sites. � � P Y 1 e �r Wero sorry,bu-irvoo is not a weo page manng yovreniry Contact For questions about this report, please contact CL Tian at cl(c)-oinkoa.com or 617-359-7343. 6