RYAN JANESKO
UX/UI RESEARCH & DESIGN
USABILATHON
Role: Research
In October 2019 I was part of a team participating in a Usabilathon challenge at George Mason University. The teams were tasked with creating a simpler experience for new and beginning farmers in partnership with the USDA and the farmers.gov site. During the day-long competition, we researched, created information architecture, and designed wireframes, culminating in a clickable prototype. We earned 1st runner-up in the competition.
Research
We started by interviewing current users, conducting a contextual inquiry, and brainstorming to get an idea of what problems the site might have. We organized our findings with an affinity map. We also conducted initial usability testing of the site to set KPI benchmarks.
We found that the biggest problem users had was finding information. Information about climate, grants, seed programs, and other vital information was scattered around the site, or buried in the middle of long paragraphs. This caused long navigation times, as users scrolled up and down a page searching for information, or navigating back and forth between pages while searching.
Information Architecture
We defined a new information architecture that more closely matched with users' mental models with a card sorting activity.
Wireframing & Testing
We used our findings to create a wireframe for usability testing.
Compared to the benchmarks gathered from the live site, our wireframe performed significantly better for time to complete and number of clicks for all tasks.
