JRMC 7013E: Emerging Media Strategy

UX Strategy — UGA-bility testing: Examining & testing the UGA website!

Project Date: November 2025

Project Overview

The UGA-bility project was a user testing assessment that I conducted to test the main UGA website. The goal of this assessment was to strengthen my usability testing skills while also examining the current UGA site for potential improvements in UX/UI. For this session, I interviewed a current UGA student and asked them to complete several tasks throughout the site like finding certain pages, downloading documents, and scheduling appointments. Afterwards, I was able to gauge their impression of the site using their feedback as well as my testing metrics.

The Problem

I began the assessment by walking my user through the plan for the testing session and preparing them for what’s to come. After going through all of the instructions, I sent over the UGA site link to get us started. As we got started, I noticed that the user seemed a bit hesitant to share their thoughts/think out loud. They seemed overwhelmed with the content on the home page and didn’t know how to articulate their thoughts out loud. In this moment, I remembered to emphasize the point that we are testing the product and not you, to the user to help them feel more at ease.

As we continued completing the tasks on the assessment, I began to realize some common pain points the user was experiencing as they navigated the site. I noticed them getting easily frustrated when there were too many hoops to jump to find certain information. A couple times I noticed them going through the same exact click paths because it felt so natural to them and then not realizing till later that they were repeating their steps. Similarly, the user would miss information that was right in front of their eyes because their first instinct would be to click through various tabs.

Although the user completed most of their tasks successfully, in the end they used the following product reaction cards to describe the website: Annoying, Clean, Complex, Hard to Use, and Inspiring. They felt as if the wording on the tabs made it confusing to navigate, there was redundant information, and often times they had no idea where to even begin looking for something specific on the mass site. It was clear that their overall impression of the sit was not desirable.

From this user testing session I was able to determine the following problems about the UGA website:

1. Overwhelming interface
2. Unclear labeling
3. Unclear button navigation

The Solution

1. I learned that sometimes users will miss information that is right in front of them because they think that they have to go through various tabs in order to find it.
2. Users will try to look for any key words that might be related to the task they are trying to accomplish when they are searching.
3. Users will typically start their search in the upper navigation tabs or the menu bar first. If they cannot find what they are looking for on there, then they will navigate back to the home page and try scrolling on there.

Results

Although I was initially intimidated by this project, I ended up genuinely enjoying conducting the user assessment. I think too many times we get caught up in the nitty gritty details of product management that we forget to take a step back and look at things from a user lens. Conducting this assessment was refreshing because I got to see/hear the user’s live thoughts as they navigated throughout the site, and it brought out a whole different perspective. I’m excited to take the lessons I’ve learned from this assignment and apply it to our larger user research assignment for our Capstone project. I think this experience will be really valuable to us as we begin testing our Beta site and promotional materials.