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Help Center & Help Menu Usability Testing

I worked as a lead researcher for this project, leading all efforts in defining the research opportunities & goals, designing the research study, identifying, recruiting, and scheduling study participants, gathering and analyzing user feedback, and communicating the results in written/verbal format to the stakeholders (UX Designers, Tech Writers, Product Managers, and Technical Application Scientists).

Define & Hypothesize

Project Background

When I joined at the beginning of summer, the team had just launched a new version of Help Center website and a new Help popup menu on the product dashboard (a.k.a. "Help 2.0"). Since the contents of Help 2.0 would correspond to the new product features that were to launch soon in BaseSpace Sequence Hub, we wanted to understand the users' overall experience and potential pain points regarding navigating, searching, and understanding the contents on Help 2.0 system.

Research Objectives

1. Can users find the right content?

• Can they find the right article or WalkMe guide for a given topic via Help 2.0?
• How do users navigate through Help 2.0?
• What do users think about new interfaces?
• WalkMe Help icons: Can users understand what they mean?

2. Can users understand the content?

• How do the article vs. WalkMe guide experiences compare to each other? Do users prefer one over the other? If so, in what circumstances?
• Can users fully grasp the new concepts to be introduced by the new product features?
• What can help with better understandability and clarity of the Help 2.0 contents?

Design & Plan

Research Design + Learning Plan

With the research objectives above in mind, I decided on gather user feedback by conducting task-based usability testing. Each 1-on-1 session would be about one hour long, and would have the participant to try to find appropriate help contents on major user task scenarios. These task scenarios were identified and prioritized by analyzing the Google Analytics user metrics and monitoring tech support call logs.

Before the testing, the participants would fill out a pre-survey via SurveyMonkey on their current usage patterns and behaviors when looking for help on our product. Specific questions revolved around what features they use the most, in what situations they frequently seek for help, and how they seek for help.

The first 25 minutes of the testing would be around the Help popup menu. The tasks revolved around understanding the users' behavior patterns and pain points when accessing help contents from the dashboard, and learn their experience of article-based vs. WalkMe-based help.

The next 25 minutes would be regarding the new Help Center website, which aimed to assess the usability and navigability of the new site, and examine the understandability of the contents provided by the site.

The last 10 minutes consisted of wrap-up questions that would review the overall user experience of Help 2.0, and gather any other final feedback.

Participant Recruiting

I aimed to recruit existing BaseSpace Sequence Hub users who are naïve to the newly launching version of the product, therefore naïve to Help 2.0. This was to make sure we had participants who would be using Help 2.0 when new features later roll out within the product they are already familiar with.

I also worked with Sr. Researcher on the team to aggregate previous user research participant databases, and with a Business Analyst to gather all internal user contacts who use our product. Then I set up user groups on company internal communication platforms (Yammer and Workplace) which served as active channels to find/recruit study participants more easily.

Through these efforts, I was able to recruit and schedule 9 internal users. They included 2 pilots (who helped iterate the test design & protocol), 4 Technical Application Scientists, 2 Field Application Scientists, and 1 bioinformatician user.

Conduct & Iterate

Study Logistics

After the learning plan was shared with stakeholders to receive final feedback and go through final iterations, the usability studies were conducted over the next 2-week period of time.

First, I provided participants with a test user account for the functioning prototypes. The participants would share their computer screens via WebEx video conferencing platform, and their screens and voices would be recorded under their permission. I conducted all sessions via UserZoom, and decided whether it would be done in-person or remotely based on their geographical location. I introduced the Concurrent Think-Aloud (CTA) protocol to the participants and encouraged them to freely share their thoughts.

Data Collection

Notes were taken during the testing, and were saved real-time on the team's user research database on Confluence. The screen recordings were also later reviewed to fill any gaps in the notes. The test design and the script also continued to have minor tweaks based on the finished sessions.

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