The Art of Education (AOE) was originally created because the founder, a former art teacher, realized that it was extremely difficult to find relevant professional development opportunities in her field. The former AOE site started as a blog and quickly grew into a site that also hosted online graduate courses and an online conference.

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The AOE founders approached Happy Medium to redesign and rebuild their website to provide both a new and improved user experience and also handle the ever-increasing traffic and expanding professional development offerings.

Discovery Step 1 – To help gain context around how people were currently using the existing site and what they would recommend for improvements, I launched a survey to the Art of Education’s active mailing list. Questions were geared towards participants’ current perceptions of the site, what tasks they most often performed, and what other resources they utilized to get continuing education. I also used the survey as a recruitment tool and asked participants if they were interested in helping with future research studies – an impressive 85 people provided their contact information. A couple excerpts from the final survey results report are shown below:

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Discovery Step 2 – After analyzing the survey results and going through site analytics and initial client discussions, I organized and facilitated a journey mapping workshop with the client and a few internal team members to start to dive into the most complex of AOE’s offerings: taking classes. We used the workshop to gain empathy and an overall understanding of AOE’s customers and also identify potential pain points with their current class experience. Prior to the workshop, I identified the four key stages of the customer’s experience: Research, Enrollment, Attending, and Post-Class. I also mapped out which information categories we would cover during the workshop: Goals, Ideas, Touchpoints, Channels, Problems, Key Takeaways, Questions, and Emotions/Overall Experience. After the workshop, I synthesized all of the information gathered and worked with a visual designer who created the following journey map that we shared with the client and kept posted in the office during the project:

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Design/Development – Throughout the design and development stages of this project, I conducted multiple rounds of concept and usability testing. During the early stages, I ran 2 rounds of remote unmoderated testing using wireframes in InVision, asking participants to find specific articles and lesson plans to test the site’s proposed navigation. After the first round, I shared the results with the lead designer, who incorporated feedback into the next round’s concepts.

Later in the design phase, I ran two additional rounds of remote unmoderated testing using the site’s PatternLab build-out (responsive, front-end framework). This testing incorporated a couple navigational tasks from earlier, but it also started to assess the users’ impressions of the visual styling of the site. Tasks also had users go through the class enrollment process as that design became flushed out. I synthesized all the testing feedback and ensured key insights were incorporated into the development staging site.

On the staging site in the time period leading up to final launch, I ran the final two rounds of usability testing that included 17 total participants. These tests were moderated and were mostly conducted in-person around the metro area and also in-office. Metrics I collected included: task completion, number of errors, single ease-of-use (SEQ) scores with context, and a SUPR-Q score with context. Test goals included:

1. Discover first clicks and initial impressions of site

2. Discover site searchability for open topics

3. Tree test the Topics/Subtopics for clarity of labels, intuitiveness of navigation

4. Determine the usability of the courses landing page and catalog

5. Determine the usability of the course enrollment process

6. Track overall site performance for usability, credibility, appearance, and loyalty

Through this testing process, the class enrollment’s billing process underwent the most development changes before launch. The following is an excerpt from the test script I created, which illustrates an example task completion path, potential errors, and SEQ score with context:

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The new and improved Art of Education site launched in early 2016 and has continued to expand on its offerings ever since. Per Happy Medium’s website, after the new site was launched “AOE saw improvements across the board. Internal site searches increased by 67%, unique users rose by 21% and all users were looking at 16% more pages and staying on the site 20% longer than they were before.”

Shown below are a couple of screenshots of the re-branded site:

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