Heuristic Evaluation
The challenge
Thrivent, a US Fortune 500 not-for-profit financial services organization, had gone through a rebranding, which included changes to its website. After the launch of the new brand, they were wanting to take a deeper look at the website's usability, architecture, and design to be sure that it gave an accurate reflection of the company's new branding.
I assisted by creating and conducting an audit of the usability and accessibility of Thrivent.com to be presented to the User Experience design team.
The journey
To begin, I viewed many examples of usability evaluations and used pieces that fit the evaluation I would be conducting. Then, I organized the criteria under each of the 10 Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen. To evaluate the accessibility, I used the WCAG 2.1 A/AA guidelines and also ran web pages through 2 different web accessibility evaluation programs (WAVE and SortSite). Here are some examples of what I came up with:
Scenarios
Created a list of reasons users might have for visiting the website. This allowed me to focus my evaluation on the user journey through the website as a whole rather than simply reviewing pages as disconnected parts.
Usability evaluation
Using Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics as a guideline, I created a list of 99 criteria to review individual pages of the website for usability concerns. Below, you will find a sampling of the criteria in the evaluation and my comments on some possible improvements for the website. In addition, I have included portions of the newly redesigned website, in which my findings helped bring about changes.
Change:
A menu or list was added under each sub-category in the drop-down menu to give users an idea of what they can find in each section. Previously, "Annuities" fell under "Insurance" but most users would not have intuitively gone to that section to learn about annuities. It is now it's own category.
Change:
A dropdown menu was added to give users an idea of what topics fell under each heading on the Main Menu. The dropdown menu includes clickable subcategories, sometimes with additional explanation about the subcategory.
Change:
Information was moved to the LIFE INSURANCE page (and removed from the PERMANENT LIFE INSURANCE page). They are now distinctly different pages with no repetitive information.
Accessibility evaluation
Using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), I created a list of 30 criteria to review each individual page for accessibility issues.
Change:
The "Contact Us" form previously had a dark background making it difficult to see the red outline and text for errors. The location and color of the error message text was not immediately noticeable. The new version of the form uses a light background and the error message is located directly below the error and in a bright red, making the error easily found.
Presenting the findings
I organized my findings by urgency and presented the team with my suggestions
