BY: YAN LI, RAMIRO BRIGUEDA & TREY PETERSON

NORMAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS WEBSITE REDESIGN REPORT

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Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………………..……………1

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………..………1

Procedure…………………………………………………………………………………………………..………1-4

Results…………………………………………………………………………………………………..…………5-11

Discussion…………………………………………………………………………………………………..…11-12

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………..………12

Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………………..……13-14

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Abstract To provide ideas on how to improve the ease of use of the Norman Public School’s website, our team designed two scenarios and invited two participants to perform a usability test. The test results showed that the navigation to the nutrition facts of each item on the school menu can’t be found, while the online account refill and the school menu are easy to be found if the user likes using the left navigation bar. The following report will describe in detail about what we found based on our usability test and what our team proposed for the usability improvement of your website.

Introduction As a connection among schools, parents/students and teaches/stuffs, your website provides lots of useful information, but we also found some flaws which had been provided in our group proposal finished on April 19, 2016. The flaws were confusing navigation bar on the homepage, hard to find the login page and nutrition facts. In April 28, 2016, our team wrote a progress memo to instruct us how to set up the usability test and how to optimize the Norman Public School website so that the users can decrease the thinking and confusing time. In the memo we have proposed two scenarios based on the flaws. In the usability test, we will ask the participants to be parents to have a homepage tour and test how easy it is to find the online account refill under login page and the school menu under nutrition page. The usability test would like to test the how easily the users can use the navigation and searching bar to complete above tasks rather than get some statistic data to analyze. The test data will instruct us how to improve your website to serve the parents/students and faculties in Norman District.

Procedure

Starting the Usability Test

In order to ensure that our participants weren’t exposed to any unneccesary distractions, our team secured a private room to administer the usability test. A camera, a microphone, and a screen capturing software was used moniter the participants as they took the test.

The usability test was comprised of two participants, one male and one female. Although both participants are students, neither participant has ever used Norman Public Schools’ website before.

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Figure 1: Participant 1 Figure 2: Participant 2

A standardized scripted introduction was read to both participants to prevent any bias about the website before they actually start using the website. The script, located in the appendix, emphasized that the usability test is meant to test the website not the participants. Also, the scripted introduction instructed the participants to verbalize their thoughts and actions. When they articulate their thoughts, it becomes much easier to formulate their experience with the website into usable results. The particapants also signed a waiver form, located in the appendix, to verify that their test will be used for the purposes of this study.

Homepage Tour

After directing both participants to Norman Public Schools’ website, they were instructed to scroll through the homepage and describe it to us. The purpose of the homepage tour is to gauge the effectiveness of the general design of the website. The participants are expected to decribe any positive or negative attributes the homepage may have. They were also prompted to list the most important items one should be able to find on the website’s homepage.

Participant 1 felt that the homepage was pretty gray and didn’t think that there was a whole lot of information on it that he would find useful. He also questioned why the weather portion of the homepage took up as much space as it did on the site.

Participant 2 thought it was confusing that many of the links on the homepage didn’t appear to be clickable. Other than that, she felt that the layout of the homepage was appropiate and that it was nice how you could connect with the school on social media through the homepage.

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Scenario 1

The first scenario in the usability test involved the participants in finding the parent/student login portal to complete a task. One of the most important aspects of a school website is an easily accessable login portal. Parents use this portal to look up their child’s grades and lunch account. This scenario involved a parent looking up their child lunch account and is written as follows:

You are the parent of a 9th grade child that attends Norman High School who eats both breakfast and lunch at the school. Suppose the lunch worker at the school notified your child today during lunch that the money in their lunch account is almost empty. In order to refill the money in their account, you must open your child’s lunch account on the school website.

Participant 1 first tried to find the login portal on the specific school website. After he failed finding the the login portal through the schools tab, he found it simply on the parents tab. He thought it was strange that he wasn’t prompted with the login as soon as he made it to the login page.

Participant 2 tried to find the portal using the search bar but found to her dismay that the search bar was unable to find the login portal, even after trying several search variations. Then, she clicked the login tab, where she was able to find the login portal under parent meal payments.

Scenario 2

The second scenario continued lunch theme from the the last scenario. Both participants were asked to find the school lunch menu for the day of the test along with key nutritional facts about the food being served that day. With rising obesity trends among young people in the United States, many parents are concerned with what their children are eating. The scenario was read to the participants as follows:

As a parent, you are concerned about the lunches being served to your student. You’d like to advise your child about some of the healthier choices on the school menu. You decide to check the school website to get information about the school nutrition program. In order to properly explain some of the healthier choices on the menu, you must find the school menu and information about the nutrition facts of each item on the menu. Participant 1 tried to find the school lunch menu on the calendar but was unable to find it listed there. He then switched between several different tabs before he finally arrived on the district tab where child nutrition was listed on the navigation menu. From there, he was able to find the school menu; however, he could not find the nutrition facts on the same page. After

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struggling for several minutes, the participant was unable to find anything pertaining to the lunch menu’s nutritional facts. He feels that the nutrition facts should be located near the actual lunch menu.

Participant 2 was able to find the school menu under the child nutrition tab. She didn’t understand why the nutrition facts weren’t located along with the lunch menu. She thought it was deceptive for the website to title a tab child nutrition but not provide any nutrition facts.

Supplementary Testing

After completing scenarios 1 and 2, the participants were given free reign over the website to explore anything that seemed important to them. The monitors of the test are only acting as flies on the wall; they are only observing the users without giving any additional guidance. This test is meant to discover items that a typical user would find important on the website. It also help the monitors understand how user friendly the website is as a whole and whether or not it meets a typical user’s needs.

Participant 1 immediately moved on to the athletic page of the site and was pleasantly surprised by the completeness of the team schedules. He noted that the athletics site was much better than his own high school, Eisenhower. He was disappointed by the fine arts section because it didn’t include any of the fine arts offered in school like band, vocal music, and orchestra.

Participant 2 liked the many brochures that were provided on the website. She noted that the calendar would be better suited on the homepage. She was also upset that she couldn’t find any information about the teachers employed by Norman Public Schools.

Finishing the Usability Test

In concluding the usability test, both participants were asked about their overall thoughts after using the website. The purpose of the this section of the test was to observe the pains and gains that the participants had whlie using the website. The entire usability test lasted nearly 15 minutes for both participants.

Participant 1 thought it was a pain finding the nutritional facts page but thought that the website covered many of things he would like to see on a school website.

Participant 2 thought that the Norman Public Schools’ website was pretty navagatable, but she is still concerned that she couldn’t find any information about the teachers that could be teaching her kids.

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Results

Major Problem 1: The School Lunch Menu Lacks Nutrition Facts

Based on the usability test described in the previous section, both participants were unhappy that the school website did not provide any nutritional facts for the lunch items that the school is serving.

Figure 3: Page where the school menu can be found but not the nutrition facts.

In figure 3, you can clearly see that the nutrion facts are not readily available for parents. It has a note at the bottom stating that all foods are meeting the health requirements set by the USDA, but it doesn’t give parents a list of nutrition facts for each item on the menu. Both participants found it extremely frustrating that the school doesn’t provide information that is vitally important many parents concerned with obesity rates among children. Our team believes that nutrition facts need to needed to be added to the school menus.

“I feel [the nutritional fact sheet] should be right on the school menu, or even when you click on the menu, the next page on the menu should be the food facts.”- Participant 1

“I clearly clicked on Child Nutrition/School Meals, but all I got in return was school meals. So I think that was definitely mislabeled. I’m kind of frustrated right now and I’m not a parent… especially with obesity being such a big deal.” – Participant 2

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Major Problem 2: The Student’s Teachers are Unable to be Found

Many parents use the School Website to look up information about their child’s teachers. Some of that information might include a email that the parent can use to contact their child’s teacher.

Figure 4: The website give a brief statement about a parent’s right to know but does not provide any details about getting that

information.

In Figure 4, the school is recognizing that parents need access to certain information about its teachers, but provides no way for parent to go about getting that information. Participant 2 believes that this information needs to be on the website and easily accessible to all parents. As the state of Oklahoma continues to fall nationally in education, parents are getting more concerned with the ability of public school faculty to teach their children. In light of this, our team recomends

that a database of all the teachers under your employment should be available on the school website, complete with contact information, proof of certification, and proof of college graduation. By doing this, parents will be less worried that their children aren’t getting the education they deserve.

“It doesn’t really list like the teacher, huh? ... If I wanted to know contact information for my children’s teacher or something. That would be something that I would be looking for, honestly. And, um, that needs to be easily accessible” – Participant 2

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Major Problem 3: The Search Bar is Ineffective

One of the easiest ways to navigate a website with a lot of information is to use the search bar. Using a search bar allows a user filter through all of the information that does not pertain to them. When a search bar is not working, the website become much less user friendly.

Figure 5: This screen capture show that the current search bar can’t even handle simple searches that a parent will regularly

make.

From Figure 5, it is obvious that the search bar is unable to find the most important page in the document, the parent login portal. Participant 2 spent quite a bit of time trying to use the search bar for this reason. Without a working search bar, what take your users one click to find something might start taking three of four clicks.

“I tried parent login, student login, and login…and I don’t see it. I give up. That’s too many searches.”-Participant 2

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Minor Problem 1: The Login Portal isn’t Obviously Accessible

The most common reason for a parent to use the school website is to login to parent portal. While both participants were able to find the login portal relatively quickly, it will make it easier if a link to the login was provided on the login page.

Figure 6: The login page could be more user friendly if this page had a link to the login portal right under the login heading.

In Figure 6, the Norman Public School Website gives a description of a safe and secure login portal but doesn’t show the actual login link. On the navigation bar, the options Parent/Student Portal and Parent Meal Payment take the user to

the exact same portal. Instead of having separate links on the navigation bar, it would be more effiecient to place one link right above the paragraph describing the login portal. This would place the login portal at the center of the page, where a parent/student will see it easier.

“Ok, I thought initially when I clicked login, I would be prompted as soon as I clicked login” –Participant 1

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Minor Problem 2: The Calendar isn’t on the Homepage

All parents are curious to know when important events are coming up. It is important that the homepage has a calendar for parents to use throughout the year.

Figure 7: The school calendar is located on a separate tab than the homepage.

Some important dates that a parent might want to have marked could include the first day of classes, breaks, and graduation. Like participant 2, parents don’t want to hunt for the dates and times of important events. In figure 7 however, the calendar is located on a different tab. Although it isn’t difficult to find, the calendar is more important than other item on the homepage like Pre-Kindergarten Drawing Results and the Norman Public Schools Foundation. The calendar should be a focal point of the homepage.

“I think [the calendar] would be really important to maybe put on like homepage or something cause if I wanted to find when a certain event was, you know, I would just want to get it off the homepage and look at it right away. I wouldn’t want to search for it.”-Participant 2

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Minor Problem 3: : The Fine Arts Tab Lacks Information About the School’s Fine Arts Program

Figure 8: The fine arts page lacks any information about what students in the fine arts program do.

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Unlike the athletics page, which is complete with both schedules and pictures of student athletes, the fine arts page is complete bare of any material pertaining to the fine arts. According to Figure 8, the only useful piece of information on the fine arts page is the contact number of the director of fine arts. Participant 1 pointed out that this page should be full of the activities of the music groups as well as showcasing the talents of Norman art students. Parents always love to show off their kids, so they would like to have a place to get pictures of the projects their children are doing in class.

Discussion According to the results of the usability test, Norman Public School’s website contains several design flaws that can confuse and frustrate its users. We predicted that the login page and nutrition facts were the biggest design flaws within the site, and our tested users displayed varying difficulty finding the parent/student login while both participants failed in finding a nutrition fact page. By following the fixes below, our team believes that an updated school website will allow parents and students to navigate through its pages more efficiently and less stressfully.

The most important item to fix is the lack of nutrition facts on the website. A short term fix to this problem could be adding a medal system next to each items on the lunch menu. By adding a gold medal next to healthy choices, a silver medal next to moderate choices, and a bronze medal next to less healthy choices, your schools can quickly inform parents about the general healthiness of your menu without creating complicated tables and doing lengthy research. This option might not completely satisfy parents, so in the future, more in depth information might need to be provided. We recommend that your school hires a nutritionist to create a databate of all the items on your menu filled with all of the nutrtion facts that immediately pertains to a persons health.

The next issue is update the teacher’s page on the website with more detailed information about each teacher’s accomplishments. A short term fix would be to add small searchable teacher’s bios that would contain information like a proof of a bachelor’s degree, proof of a teacher’s certification, and records of the average test scores a typical student is making on the state exam while in this teacher’s class. This information would insure parents that their

“I kind of expected the different types of fine arts. Like band, orchestra, singing. There is literally none of that here.”- Participant 1

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student is being taught by a quality instructor that produces good results. A long term fix would be to create class links for every class offered at the school. Here, parents can have access to the teacher’s work email as well as the class syllabus. Parents are always curious as what their children are learning in class, and a page for this class would allow parents to keep up with their children as they progress through the class.

Finally, we recommend fixing the search bar, so that can pull up many of the major pages according to certain keywords. We recommend that you have an IT worker link many of the major search words to its respective page. This will make it easier for users to find the login page, lunch menu and calendar. Later, we also recommend that your school hires a computer specialist to overhaul the entire website to make every word on the website searchable.

Conclusion Therefore, three main problems were identified after conducting the usability test: (1) the lack of nutritional facts on the school lunch, (2) the inability to locate the school’s teachers, and (3) the ineffectiveness of the search bar. As stated earlier in the discussion, each problem identified should be fixed in the order that they were presented. Additional usability testing is recommended to identify issues that affect students directly. While the users we focused on when we conducted our usability test were parents, students are equally as important. It would be interesting to see how the results compare to parents. As for profitability, the usability test is essential to increasing the funding that the school district receives. The more effective the website is, the more appealing the school district will be to families looking to move to Norman. As a result, with an increase in students, the evidence for more funding is crystal clear.

On behalf of my team, I would like to thank you for your time and business. We’ve enjoyed the opportunity to work with your company.

Thank you for your time. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact me. I look forward to working with you and your company again in the future.

Best regards,

Ramiro Brigueda

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Appendix

Scripted Intro Hi, ___________. My name is ___________, and I’m going to be walking you through this session today. Before we begin, I have some information for you, and I’m going to read it to make sure that I cover everything. You probably already have a good idea of why we asked you here, but let me go over it again briefly. We’re asking people to try using a Web site that we’re working on so we can see whether it works as intended. The session should take about a half hour. The first thing I want to make clear right away is that we’re testing the website of Norman Public School (NPS), not you. You can’t do anything wrong here. In fact, this is probably the one place today where you don’t have to worry about making mistakes. As you use the site, I’m going to ask you as much as possible to try to think out loud: to say what you’re looking at, what you’re trying to do, and what you’re thinking. This will be a big help to us. Also, please don’t worry that you’re going to hurt our feelings. We’re doing this to improve the site, so we need to hear your honest reactions. If you have any questions as we go along, just ask them. I may not be able to answer them right away, since we’re interested in how people do when they don’t have someone sitting next to them to help. But if you still have any questions when we’re done I’ll try to answer them then. And if you need to take a break at any point, just let me know. You may have noticed the microphone. With your permission, we’re going to record what happens on the screen and our conversation. The recording will only be used to help us figure out how to improve the site, and it won’t be seen by anyone except the people working on this project. And it helps me, because I don’t have to take as many notes. Also, there are a few people from the Web design team observing this session in another room. (They can’t see us, just the screen.) If you would, I’m going to ask you to sign a simple permission form for us. It just says that we have your permission to record you, and that the recording will only be seen by the people working on the project. Do you have any questions so far?

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Waiver Form

Thank you for participation in our usability research.

We will be recording your session to allow Norman Public Schools officials who are unable to be here today to observe your session and benefit from your comments.

Please read the statement below and sign where indicated.

I understand that my usability test will be recorded.

I grant Norman Public Schools permission to use this recording for the purpose of improving the design being tested.

Signature: _____________________________________________________________________

Print Your Name: _______________________________________________________________

Date: _________________________________________________________________________