Emerging Media Case Study- UGAbilty Testing

Conducting a Practical Usability Test for the University of Georgia’s Flagship Website

Fall 2025

Project Overview

The purpose of the UGAbility Testing project was to conduct a real test with pre-provided tools as a primer for designing a test for our own Emerging Media Capstone Projects. The primary goal was to treat this as a learning experience, and to see what lessons we can derive from being in the role of a usability test conductor, as well as to learn the basics of statistical analysis for usability testing. We used the University of Georgia Website, UGA.edu, as well as a pre-prepared script and set of tasks provided by our instructor.

The Problem

The University of Georgia is a huge institution with serving over 50,000 people when including the ~48,000 students and ~12000 faculty and staff. Given the total breadth of topics, information, and potential audience the site needs to serve, the usability of the main homepage is of paramount importance to test. The problem is, without substantial data, it is unknown what is working well for the site, and what needs improvement.

The Solution

To determine where the problems are, and what works, the solution is simple: ausability test. Usability testing is a method to evaluate a product or service by observing real users as they attempt to complete tasks, in order to identify usability problems and areas for improvement. It involves researchers giving specific tasks to participants and observing their actions and feedback to see how easy the product is to use, identify pain points, and gauge user satisfaction.

In our usabilty test we used a combination of two types of tasks. The first we simply evaluted whether or not the user was able to complete the task. The user was given a simple goal, and asked to get there. Provided the user doesn’t get lost or abandon the task whithin a reasonable amount of time, the task counts as a success. During the performance of this task, we encourage our users to think aloud, describing their thoughts and feelings, and we observe their facial expressions and reactions as they go about completing the task. The following tasks were provided to test:

Task 1 You’re interested in applying to Grad School at UGA, but have some questions. How much is the application fee to apply?

Task 2 You’re worried about a friend who is going through a hard breakup. Find the Student Care and Outreach website and open the Campus Community and Mental Health resources.

Task 3 You’re a prospective student trying to apply for Financial Aid. Is the 2026–27 FAFSA currently available?

The second type of task we had the users perform were timed tasks, where the metric we studied were how long it takes the user to perform the task. The think aloud principal was not in effect here, but it was important for me to note the click path and reactions of the user during this test. The following timed tasks with sample success paths were used for the usability test.

Task 4 You are an undergrad student planning to change your major, but you want to explore your options. Where would you find the UGA Bulletin? Success: Browse Degrees → Bulletin

Task 5 You’re planning for the Spring semester and want to know when classes start. What’s the first day of classes for Spring 2026? Success: Scroll down to Resources for Current Students → Academic Calendar → 2025–2026

Task 6 Your younger sibling wants to visit campus but isn’t interested in a guided tour. Download a copy of the Self-Guided Tour Map. Success: Click Plan Your Visit → Visit Our Campus → Scroll down to “Self-Guided Tours”

Task 7 Yay, you’ve graduated and now you are an alum! You decide to make a gift of an annual donation to UGA. Find the link to pay by credit card. Success: Alumni → Give to UGA → Scroll to Credit Card → Make a Gift

After the questions were complete, I asked a series of followup questions to try and guage the tester’s thoughts, and used a couple of tools to to guage their impressions. The first tool we used was a card sorting array, where the user was encouraged to pick the five words that matched their experience the most (pictured below).

Product Reaction Cards

The final tool used as a part of this was the System Usability Scale (SUS), a 10-item questionnaire that provides a global view of a user’s subjective assessment of a system’s usability. The questions are rated along the Likert scale (Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree) and, with a small amount of math, gives us a quick reference measure of how effective the system is on a scale of 1–100. The usability score my user got from their experience was a 65/100 which is on the bottom end of an average usable system, and indicates that there are definetly improvement to be made.

The SUS (System Usability Scale)

Results

From this usability test, I determined that the UGA website has a major navigability problem. In the assigment I wrote the following assessment:

The site is very broad and links a lot of different places, so navigation is one of the most difficult challenges, so much so that most of the tasks focused on it. There are some redundancies built in but not where you’d think. For example, the A-Z directory has a lot of pages but its not comprehensive, which makes it difficult when using it as a fallback navigation tool.

The user I tested was my partner whose impression of the site was that it was very pretty, but also difficult to use. On this subject I wrote the following in my report:

The words my tester used to describe the site were Attractive, Frustrating, Professional, Stressful, Time Consuming. To Mary, the site was very pretty and the actual content of the homepage — the stats and the videos, were very pleasant. Where she experienced frustration was at how many steps it took to reach the goal objectives. She is a competitive person at heart, and felt like the site wasn’t rewarding her logical leaps when it came to navigation. The site essentially made her think, and then didn’t reward that thinking.

Overall, I think the site has plenty of issues, but it also has deal with the difficult task of funnelling people to thousands of possible bespoke sites. I did learn a great deal about usability testing from this as well. Primarily for my capstone project, I plan to oreint tasks towards more than one aspect of the application, rather than just focusing of navigation. Additionally, I plan to make sure my users are well fed and able to focus on the test, as my user was hungry during the test, and I felt that it might have been a confounding variable in some of her experiences.