This week in class we were exploring the differences between good and bad websites, exploring our ideas further and creating wireframes on paper. Thankfully, one of our chosen websites to research was the Massey electives flow for finding new information, since that's what my topic is about. In my user testing with a classmate it took her 20 minutes to find the yellow booklet containing the information, because it's not on the main Massey site, only on Coca, and even when you're on Coca's site its hard to find since it's a PDF.

I asked students in class what they thought of the yellow book and overall there were two main problems with it:

It doesn't provide enough useful information – it's literally just a brief description

And it isn't sortable/filterable – meaning students have to look through multiple pages of random electives when they might only be interested in VCD ones.

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With that information I started with the hardest problem first – what other information is necessary for students to see. What other info are they looking for? In doing that, I asked two seperate groups of 4 students for 10 minutes of their time to do a card sorting exercise with me, in which we brainstormed different pieces of information they'd like to see on the site, and then ordered them based on priority.

This proved to be an extremely valuable experience as I was learning directly from my target audience what they were looking for – perfect. They ranked the top 5 as: Name, Description, Copy of brief, Student work photos, and lecturer information.

A great stepping point into wire framing when we're back from the holidays – I'll probably jump straight into Figma as I work faster there than with a pen and paper.