Our content audit examined, assessed, and evaluated the quality of the content that is hosted on the Yale Usability website. During this process, I noticed a correlation when there was a page that performed poorly on the content audit, the page views directly reflected it. This allowed us to target pages that required assistance and put them on a priority over pages and sections that were performing well.

Another pattern that I noticed from the content audit was siloed page views. Both the “Understanding Your User” and “Accessibility” sections performed 3-10x better than the following sections. This insinuates that the majority of the users who stumbled on these pages did not find interest in the other sections.

To understand our users' needs and goals, I interviewed 13 people who fall under Yale employees, UX professionals, other ivy league UX designers, and UX design students. We chose these user groups based on data collected by our Google analytics, competitor analysis, and stakeholder interviews. 

‍

The following data is the top user needs and pain points that were collected during the user interviews:

The biggest takeaway from the user interviews was the educational nature of the website. All of our users wanted to utilize our usability website to either gain a better understanding of UX topics or provide someone else with information about UX. 

To help to build empathy for users and understand their needs, we created user archetypes that help model, summarize, and communicate information about users who have been observed or researched. I created three archetypes that represent the users we should be designing for in the future: the student, scholar, and ambassador.

While the discovery phase of this project is completed, there is still design and implementation to be done. Check back soon to see how our discovery findings influenced the future of usability.yale.edu!