User research
Updates Information Architecture
Following on from the user stories we’ve worked on with W3C, we are now testing if we have the right information about people who use the W3C website. We are doing this through two ways - a public user survey and focussed stakeholder interviews.
The responses we receive will be used to:
- Confirm how the redesign will support W3C’s business objectives
- Inform the technical investigation in order to understand any limitations
- Get a clearer understanding of specific user needs
The public survey
Why a public survey? We want to gather feedback from a wide-range of W3C website users to make sure we’ve included all the core user groups of the website, and that we are not excluding any minority groups in our user experience work.
We are using SurveyGizmo to run the survey, based on community-driven research and because they publish their accessibility credentials.
We are gathering data to be analysed from the survey from the 11th May 2020 - 21st May 2020. The survey may be open for longer, however the data collected between these dates will be used to inform our user research at this phase.
The survey was advertised in the following places:
- W3C wiki
- W3C Slack channel
- W3C web redesign email group
- W3C website
- W3C Twitter account
Stakeholder interviews
We are conducting “face to face” stakeholder interviews with key contributors and users of the W3C website, people who have a vested interest in the project’s success. The interviews are being carried out on the 20th-22nd May 2020.
We will analyse each individual interview initially and then examine them collectively afterwards, resulting in a report which will inform design decisions and help define UX milestones and objectives.
Who did we interview?
W3C helped to identify 12 key stakeholders to interview:
- Richard Ishida - W3C Team, I18N lead
- Léonie Watson - longtime WG chair + AB member
- Michael Champion - Longtime large US corp AC rep + AB member (recently retired)
- Nigel Megitt - small WG chair
- fantasai - longtime WG participant + AB member
- John Riviello - Comcast AC rep + volunteered to be an audience resource in the Website redesign project
- Sam Weiler - W3C staff
- Chris Needham - AC rep, IG Chair, WG participant, and media industry point of view
- Charles Nevile (chaals) - Former W3C Team, Former AC rep, current AB member, WG participant
- Alan Bird - W3C Team, W3C business development lead
- Daniel Peitner - WG participant, has dabbed in designing a WG homepage
- Laurent Flory, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Université de Lyon - works with researchers who are participating in W3C WGs, sees his AC-Rep “job” as administrative and representative
What questions did we ask?
- What are your primary reasons for visiting the W3C site usually?
- What information within the website is most useful to you?
- What does the W3C website help you achieve?
- How do you access this information currently?
- Does anything get in the way of you completing your tasks or make finding the information harder? What would make it easier?
- Do you look at any secondary information or are you purely focussed on one thing?
- Is there any other information that would be of interest to you?
- Is there anything you would like to be able to do onsite that you can’t currently?
- What do you think success looks like in this redesign?
- What challenges do you see this project facing?
- What do you think about the tone of voice and how things are communicated? Is the information clear, concise and easy understand?
- What impression does the current W3C site give off?
- Final Thoughts?