Throughout the Fall 2020 semester, our team was paired with a comprehensive cancer center to conduct research and help answer the questions “who is using our site?” and “how can we improve their experience?”
Duration September 2020 - December 2020 (4 months)
Client Course project for Contextual Inquiry and Consulting Foundations with Kentaro Toyama, in partnership with a leading comprehensive cancer center
Process & Tools Background research reports, interview protocol, contextual interviews, affinity diagrams (Miro), and final consultation report and presentation
My Role As a course project, each member of our team was responsible for all aspects of the project. In addition to the process detailed below, I also led the design and formatting of deliverables for our client.
Team Dylan Coakley, Bulgan Jugderkhuu, and Michael Kunz
The Challenge
Despite being pioneers in cancer research and education, the Cancer Center is struggling with accurately representing their impact in a user-friendly way on their website. Although they have existing Research + Education pages, research faculty have criticized these pages for making information difficult to find, poor organization, and inadequately describing the breadth of their research. The client is looking to find new ways to organize their content, feature more of the current research initiatives, and make the site accessible and inclusive to all users, including patients, their families, and other care providers.
Background Research Report
We began the process of contextual inquiry by completing background research reports in several areas, such as the history of cancer treatment and the institution, the current state of cancer research, and emerging technologies in the field.
My research report focused on competitive analysis between Cancer Center website and the websites of peer institutions in cancer and research, including the Penn Medicine Abramson Cancer Center and the University of Michigan Office of Research.
I identified several potential solutions based on these competitors, including:
Restructuring the Research + Education landing page to help audience self-select relevant information
Adding additional descriptions to category headings for clarity
Creating consistent navigation menus across each page on the site
Interview Protocol
We approached our user interviews with a semi-structured approach, crafting a list of broad questions to help guide our conversation with interviewees.
Some key questions that we asked our interview participants:
From your perspective, what purpose does the Education + Training page serve?
When did you last find information relevant to your work on the site. Can you walk us through your steps? What made these tasks difficult? What made these tasks easy?
Which aspects of your research would you like people to be able to see on the Research + Education page? Why?
Interviews and Interpretation Sessions
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all contextual interviews for this project were held virtually over Zoom. Although this impacted our ability to observe our interviewees in context of the workplace, we were still able to ask plenty of questions and get a better sense of how they used the Research + Education site day-to-day. Our team conducted interviews in pairs, with one interviewer and one notetaker.
After each interview, we debriefed as a full team, translating our interview responses into affinity notes, which consolidating facts stated in the interview, direct quotes from our interviewees, and general insights relevant to our client’s problem. Below are a few quotes that were particularly helpful in shaping our approach to brainstorming solutions.
“I recommend the website to help my colleagues find contact information for other researchers”
“The website needs to be updated frequently, which can be hard with a small development team.”
“I don’t think that the information pathways on the site are intuitive.”
Affinity Wall
With our affinity notes gathered from our interviews, our next step was to start organizing similar notes into an affinity wall. Sorting our notes by major themes made it easier to analyze similar problems identified by our interviewee groups and establish areas where we could make recommendations to improve the user experience.
As our team was working remotely, we made our affinity wall using Miro, instead of the standard physical sticky note method. The Miro platform made it easy for us to continually collaborate after our initial session and add additional notes after later interviews. Our affinity notes ultimately coalesced into four main categories, design and content, ease of use, information management, and audience.
Findings
From our interviewees, we learned some key insights into how the site’s users were accessing, using, and sharing the website.
Interviewees felt strongly that the Research + Education needed to cater to the research community and patients at the Cancer Center.
Faculty researchers use the site infrequently, and primarily to find contact information for their colleagues.
Staff of the Cancer Center felt that the visual design of the website impacted their use of the site and the likelihood to share the site with others.
Solutions and Recommendations
Based on the qualitative data from our interviews, our team crafted a series of recommendations for graphic, organizational, and process enhancements, including:
Graphic Design and Visual Content
The Cancer Center has an opportunity to quickly leverage existing institutional branding to improve the aesthetics of the site through brand guidelines, color schemes, and fonts from its parent institution. Following branding guidelines can help the Cancer Center Research + Education website build on the parent institution’s standing reputation of excellence in research and education. Updating the design of the site can help make the page feel more modern and engaging, as well as increase accessibility with improved color contrast.
Website Update Process
We believe that a crucial part of the Cancer Center’s success revolves around improved processes for requesting and making site content updates. Our team recommended implementing a ticketing system to intake and track update requests. This form, implemented via Google Forms, would help establish transparent timelines and processes for web designers and researchers to work more effectively together.
Searchable Researcher Profiles (right)
Our primary recommendations is to update the existing “Cancer Center Members” page with more robust and searchable researcher profiles. The profiles would include:
A photo, contact information, research program(s), department(s)
Links to lab pages or profiles that may live on other departmental websites
A succinct biography (either written or in video format)
A list of researcher areas of interests, credentials, honors and awards, and publications
We believe that the creation of these profiles will help make it easier for current research faculty to search and find their colleagues information, trainees to identify research faculty in their fields of interest, and aid patients and families to learn more about the clinicians responsible for their care.
Final Presentation
To wrap up our findings and report back to our stakeholders, we crafted a full written report for their reference, as well as a short presentation to discuss our major findings. Click the link below to read the report or click through the slides to the right!