Increasing Usability to Help Build Community Through Mural Art
A Usability Evaluation for Mural Routes
1-minute read
OVERVIEW
Our team of 5 grad students at the Pratt DX Center partnered with Mural Routes to conduct a usability evaluation on their website experience. A total of 10 participants were recruited for this study, where we defined 6 tasks that tested broadly across their website.
Key findings:
We found that users felt disheveled by the visual busyness of the home page, and also felt that a prominent vision statement or tagline was missing from the home page for them to easily understand what their core offerings were upon entering the site.
A lack of drop-down menus, coupled with a deep website hierarchy and an unclear labelling system, prevented users from easily navigating the website.
Unconvincing messaging on why someone should ‘donate’ or ‘become a member’ was combined with unnoticeable CTA buttons that wouldn’t persuade users to act.
Our team developed design solution mockups to address these key findings. Since delivering our evaluation report to Mural Routes’ key stakeholders, they’ve been able to implement the following design recommendations we gave them: 1). add a mission statement to their home page, 2). develop a more informative donate page, 3). add drop-down menus to their global nav, and 4). create a more prominent donate CTA button.
6-minute read
BACKGROUND
How can we improve information retrieval to promote core offerings?
Mural Routes was born in 1990 with the creation of the first ‘mural route’ in Scarborough, Canada — a collection of 12 murals depicting Toronto’s heritage painted on various buildings. Since its beginnings, Mural Routes has grown to become the only member-based not-for-profit arts service organization in Canada dedicated to the creation, development and promotion of public wall art. With a commitment to community-building, Mural Routes also mentors the youth, supports artists, and encourages communities to create public art.
Their website offers a robust amount of information to the public, from listings of upcoming meetups and mural education programs, to informative resources on mural preservation and project management.
We conducted a moderated remote user testing study to evaluate the Mural Routes web experience. Our primary goal was to ensure the public was able to discover and access the wealth of information on Mural Routes’ website by streamlining the information seeking process.
Timeline:
6 weeks (March 23th - May 5th, 2021)
Tools:
UserZoom; Figma; Miro
Team:
Mishi Sarda, Jessica Drozd, Elisabeth Pefanis, Katherin Aristizabal & Myself
My Role:
Moderate usability testing sessions; synthesize insights into findings; report writing; present findings
Deliverables:
OUR PROCESS
Defining our testing participants.
Mural Routes revealed 5 user profiles they’ve targeted from previous user studies. For our study, our team decided to narrow this down to two profiles: Mural Art Enthusiasts and Professional Mural Artists. This decision was shaped in part by the similarities these profiles share, and that these profiles were more likely to seek information from all areas of the website.
The recruitment of participants was conducted via social media channels related to mural art, the Pratt School of Information mailing list, and through targeted recruitment of known mural artists/artists. Each group member was responsible for recruiting two participants and moderating two testing sessions. Based on our established user profiles, we screened for potential participants by using the following criteria:
Have a relationship with mural art either through interest or vocation
Be connected with art organizations either through membership or donation
10 participants were selected for the user study, comprising the following breakdown:
Figure 1. Breakdown of participants
100% of participants were connected to an art organization through membership or donation. Some of which included:
The Frick
MoMa
The Met
RAW Artists
Creative Arts Agency
Testing across the website.
Our team chose to establish a broad scope for the website testing because we wanted to see how users navigated through several of Mural Routes’ important offerings which spanned across the website. Therefore, we developed 6 tasks that touched on 5 areas of the site: 1). Become a Member 2). News 3). Learning 4). Resources and 5). Donate. All users tested the site on a desktop/laptop device.
Our Tasks:
Become a Member - Find information about becoming a member.
News - Find the last time a monthly member meetup happened.
Learning - You are interested in taking a mural art class. Find a mural art class that has recently been offered by Mural Routes.
Resources - You’re interested in creating a mural project on a building in your community, how would you find relevant information for this project?
Learning/News - You want to read about the Keynote speakers from the latest National Mural Symposium. Find the report from the last Mural Symposium.
Donate - You are concerned with how murals are being maintained in your community and want to make a donation. How would you do this?
OUR FINDINGS
What worked.
“I like what the organization stands for and the site does a good job highlighting that.”
All of the participants were unfamiliar with Mural Routes before testing and were first-time users of the site. From just ~30 minutes using the site, participants were able to gather a good sense of Mural Routes mission, an ode to the strength in Mural Routes’ purposeful offerings and site content.
“[The website] provides a pretty thorough listing of what Mural Routes does.”
Participants appreciated the wealth of information that was provided on the website, and noted the helpfulness of the sources available to them.
“I think the member directory was cool and I would want to be a part of that so that I can connect with other artists and get my name and art out there.”
Several participants remarked on the community building aspect of Mural Routes’, and how the site provides many resources for getting involved within the mural community.
3.7
was the average rating participants gave the site on a scale of 1). being difficult to navigate to 5). being easy
8/10
of participants said they would use the site again
What can be improved.
By defining what worked first, our team was able to keep these strengths central when developing the following recommendations for improvement. My teammates Elisabeth, Katherin and myself primarily focused on synthesizing testing insights into findings, while Mishi and Jessica worked on mocking up our proposed design solutions.
Finding 1: Visually Busy Home Page
Reduce visual clutter and include prominent vision statement and CTA buttons
“The page format is overwhelming. A lot of reading needs to happen to understand…”
Users felt that the Home page was too busy and were distracted by the carousel of moving images overtop of heavy graphics (see Figure 2). Upon their first impression of the website, users also remarked on how the Home page didn’t include any purpose/vision statement and that it took some additional navigating to figure out what the website was all about. Jakob Nielsen’s (2011) guidance on this is that “to gain several minutes of user attention, you must clearly communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds.”
Figure 2. Carousel on Home page
Proposed Solution
Include Mural Routes’ vision statement when users are greeted on the Home page so they don’t have to go far before knowing what Mural Routes is about. Some of the busy design aspects should be muted and users should also be able to view the carousel at their own pace as a carousel that moves on its own can be an accessibility issue. Additionally, create bolder CTA buttons to call attention to more important functions of the website. See Figure 3 for a mockup of this redesign.
Figure 3. Redesigned Home page
Finding 2: Confusing Information Architecture
Improve information architecture by restructuring content and including drop-down menus
"I was kind of lost because I didn't think of news being the place to find [Member Meetups]..."
All 10 participants experienced usability challenges with the labels on the global navigation bar. Furthermore, participants weren’t given any clues (via dropdown menus) about what information would be included in these broad categories. Users were forced into aimless clicking to find information by trial and error.
Figure 4. Unclear global navigation categories
Proposed Solution
Use the proposed site map (Figure 6 below) to restructure content into areas that make more sense to users. Including a dropdown menu for each label on the global navigation will also help users gather an easier understanding of what kind of information is included in each category (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Redesigned global navigation with drop-down menus
Figure 6. Revised site map
Finding 3: Lack of Convincing CTAs
Encourage users to donate and/or join by giving them clearer information about Mural Routes’ offerings.
“The information is helpful for people who already want to become a member, but it is not very helpful for people who are not sure or not completely convinced about becoming a member”
Being that Mural Routes is a member-based, non-profit arts service organization, it’s crucial for the website to provide clear information on membership benefits and reasons to donate. Yet, users felt that these pages lacked enough information to convince them to become members or to donate.
"It seems very easy to give donations but very vague in terms of where the donation is going towards”
Figure 7. Become a Member page
Proposed Solution
Break down the text-heavy aspects of the Become a Member and Donate pages through use of graphics and splashes of color, keeping the same colorful design consistency that is used throughout the rest of the site. Adding images of the artists, murals, or events that have been funded by donations also help users feel reassured that donating to Mural Routes makes a difference. Additionally, including pictures of murals that need funding can spark a sense of urgency and call to action from users to donate. Also, adding an option for users to express where they would like their donation to go towards would be a welcomed addition to the Donate page, after many users remarked on wanting to know more about where their donation is going.
Figure 8. Redesigned Become a Member and Donate pages
REFLECTION
What our client had to say.
Overall, the Mural Routes website communicates an authentic representation of the organization’s mission towards public wall art and community building, and this mission resonated clearly with our usability participants. This was evident when 8/10 participants remarked that they would use this website again in the future, noting the helpfulness of the site’s robust information and thorough listing of Mural Routes’ services.
Our findings indicated that though the site was fairly navigable, there were still opportunities for improvement. During our debrief session, Mural Routes commented on the feasibility of our recommendations and mentioned they’d likely be able to implement 75% of our recommendations within the coming months.
[Update December 2021]: Since our debrief, Mural Routes was able to:
Add a mission statement to their home page & develop a more informative donate page
Add drop-down menus to their global nav and create a more prominent donate CTA button
While uncovering usability issues is undoubtedly an important aim of usability studies, a big takeaway from our debrief session with Mural Routes was learning what parts of their website worked and that users enjoyed. Their team had been tossing around the idea of a brand update and were unsure of what was working and what wasn’t. After our debrief, they seemed eager to go back to their team and let them know what aspects of Mural Routes they should make sure to keep in any future brand update.
My parting thoughts.
I like to end each case study with a section on what I’d do differently if I had to do it over:
If time permitted, our team would have liked to run a card sorting activity with user testing participants so that we could have provided a more informed site map to the client as part of our recommendations for their information architecture. The site map is thus limited in that in only takes into account our research team’s perspective.