Building Better Search Experiences
SERIES OVERVIEW
This is part one of a three-part series describing how user research produced insights to develop new components; informed the design of bots that automate content publishing; and improved the search experience.
This post focuses on the user research.
STUDY DESIGN
With new research areas emerging at Princeton University, the engineering school wanted a new component to advertise and manage open faculty positions on its website. So first, I had to figure out where users — specifically job seekers — expect to find this information.
Although I prefer to talk with people in person while they use a product, remote testing is incredibly valuable with the right group and project scope. For this project, I decided to design a first-click test using Optimal Workshop.
I created a mockup of the engineering homepage and assigned one task for users to complete. After completing the task, they would be met with three follow-up questions.
ONE TASK
Where would you click to find a faculty job?
3 POST TASK QUESTIONS
1. Tell us more why you clicked the place you clicked.
2. Suppose you’re on a page that lists all open jobs. What supplemental information would you like to see?
3. What best describes your relationship to the school?
With the study ready to share, I began recruiting participants with the help of other teams at the university.
SHARING THE STUDY
Finding the right participants for testing is key. They should be a realistic user of the product or service being studied. There are several services that can help with recruitment but, sometimes, the right users exist in your organization. For this project, we had a realistic user base in-house: faculty and post-docs.
Drafting emails for this sort of thing is tricky. You’re competing with hundreds of other emails that likely take priority. So, it’s best to keep it concise and have a real good subject line.
Opportunity to influence the design of engineering.princeton.edu
With a brief email and straightforward subject line, I sent out the call for participants.
STUDY RESULTS
We recruited a total of 28 participants. Of these, eight were faculty and eight were post-docs.
Results are always fun to interpret and, often, they provide new insights into user expectations and behaviors. In this case, the key takeaways were that participants wanted to use the site’s search engine or the “resources” section to find this content.
All users preferred Search (26%) or Engage (22%). Heatmap generated by Optimal Workshop.
HEATMAP RESULTS
Faculty and postdocs also preferred Resources and Search.
Resources
24%
Search
18%
News
12%
Contact
12%
QUALITATIVE RESPONSES FROM FACULTY / POSTDOCS
“There were no other sensible options beyond that
“I have no idea where to click! This seemed like the most reasonable place.”
“Link to HR”
Making the Pitch
It’s easier to pitch, design, and develop a new feature with quantitative and qualitative data. It also inspires confidence in our stakeholders that these are sound decisions.
Given the results and additional project requirements, we decided to develop the following:
Improve the search experience for job seekers.
Create a page that lists each job opening.
Automate content publishing and management.
Next in this Series
I discuss how I helped our writing team gain extra hours in their day by leveraging API’s to automate the publishing of content.