CDC Website Heuristic Evaluation
Background + Problem
The CDC Division of Opioid Prevention developed a website for public health departments and government subject matter experts to communicate about technical issues. The site, in addition to acting as a resource center, was also serving as a platform for technical assistance requests to be made and tracked. The platform and site, however, had been developed in-house without user feedback from those submitting requests, obtaining them or anyone using it at a resource center.
The client was Research-curious; they were interested in learning more about what it could offer. The agency was open to an “expert evaluation,” (i.e. heuristic evaluation) and potentially other services.
Approach
This was a fairly straightforward research project. There would be no access to users and the turnaround was three weeks. The site/platform was not overly complex so there was no need to scope the work to specific features or design areas. I chose a heuristic evaluation method to identify areas for improvement. Resources in the agency were limited so I was the only researcher conducting the evaluation.
My goal was to understand design issues based on a set of industry best practices and offer useful recommendations. I developed a set of guidelines based off of Jakob’s 10 Usability Heuristics and heuristics used by researchers at my agency. These were placed into an Airtable and mapped against design areas in the platform/website.
Team structure
On this project I was the lead and sole Researcher. My principal contacts were with the Product and Account Managers. I also worked closely with agency content strategists and presented to the CDC client agency.
Findings
Three areas for potential design changes were identified:
Information architecture: this was the most severe issue. The organization of information was not clear, and sometimes misplaced.
Platform interaction: medium severity. A lack of bread-crumbing left the user lost, call-to-actions either were at times not explicit or over-signaled.
Visual design: this was the least severe of issues found, with some imbalance found in colors and images to text.
Impact
Direct product/service impact: the Research and design changes were heartily accepted by the client.
Strategic impact: This effort proved to be a positive introduction to Research, and allowed for a welcomed hand-over to content strategy to pick up on Information Architecture work.
Heuristics framework