Humanities common ux research

Client: Humanities Commons at the Modern Language Association

Project Type: UX Research, Interaction Design, Web Design

Software Used: Qualtrics, Rstudio, Figma

Project Overview

Humanities Commons is a social media where scholars can interact with one another to learn more about research projects. The task here was to better understand what users used Humanities Commons for, so the website could better tailor its functionalities to its users needs.

Process

I first conducted interview-based user tests with site users and non-users to collect qualitative and quantitative data to identify areas in which the website and service can improve. Then, I utilized Qualtrics to develop and distribute a survey to 100+ participants in 3 customer segments to assess the accessibility and user experience of the website.

Once I got the results of the Qualtrics survey I preprocessed, cleaned, and transformed user interview and survey data in Excel, R, and SQL (sqldf) to prepare for analysis. I then Performed statistical analysis and ran text mining models (topic and sentiment analyses) on interview and survey data in R to interpret results and identify major drivers of strong UX. I decided to use R for this project because I had a lot of data that I needed to interpret and it was the best way to do that. Not only was it good for the project itself, but it was fun learning a new software that I could potentially use again in the future.

Lastly, I collaborated with UX Research team to compile, organize analysis results to deploy design and accessibility recommendations. And created a final presentation to discuss the findings and suggestions on how to improve customer retention and satisfaction.

Lessons Learned

1. Think out side of the box! For this project, I learned to use Rstudio to interpret our Qualtrics data. Because we had so much data, using R made it easier to understand. I wouldn’t typically think of doing that, but after researching how to interpret data I dove in.