USDA Climate Hubs Project

CONTEXT

The Client

The agency links USDA research and tools from program agencies to farmers and researchers.

The Challenge

There was little to no data on how the website was performing, from what is working to what could be improved.

The Task

Conduct qualitative and quantitative discovery activities to understand the current state of the website and collect insights that are needed for the next phase. The activities included:

• Strategic Alignment and Content Workshops
• Content Inventory and Audit
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit
• User Experience Heuristic Analysis
• Website Analytics Analysis
• User Survey

My Role on the Project (September-December 2022)

As the user researcher on this project, I developed a research plan that includes goals, research questions, methods, and timeline to identify pain points, prioritize features that would enhance user experience, and evaluate processes and governance. I planned and conducted mixed methods UX research that included a heuristics evaluation and a user survey to identify issues, challenges, and user perceptions of their website.

UX PROCESS

• Following Nielsen Norman’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, I identified key areas of the website that needed improvement. For example, external links were not always apparent, and there was a lack of consistent navigation.

• I created a survey using Survey Monkey to measure user perceptions of the current site. The survey was posted on the Climate Hubs homepage.
• I collaborated closely with content strategy to analyze and present research findings and recommendations based on our discovery activities. For example, it includes the heuristics analysis findings. The survey data was not included here due to its late launch on the Climate Hubs website.

OUTCOME & INSIGHTS

We completed the strategic roadmap report, which we shared with the client on Confluence. The client decided to not continue with the second phase of the project due to budget constraints.

This discovery phase provided two key lessons:

• We identified multiple recommendations for redesigning/restructuring the website, which include navigation and information structure, content development, content governance, and page redesign.
• We identified user needs that were not able to be met by the agency at this time due to website constraints. For example, requests were made to look into adding a Spanish language translation feature to the site (for the Puerto Rican population). There was also a desire for web tools such as Agrisk and Grasscast that are currently hosted externally to be added to the Climate Hubs website.

KUDOS

Here is what my teammate said about working with me: