Leonardo’s Basement

The Client

Leonardo’s Basement was founded by parents and students of Clara Barton Open School in 1997. In their 11,000 square foot warehouse and backyard, they house a Seussian collection of materials, scrap, and tools for use by visitors in year-round class offerings as well as custom group events for schools and corporations.

Designing for a non-profit means costs of design implementation (both time and money) are top-of-mind. I wished to focus on usability recommendations that would create the greatest impact with the smallest amount of expense. Therefore, the findings you see here are geared towards content strategy, as opposed to development of new widgets or features.

Users and Audience

The client identified their primary users as parents of children and teens, teachers and school administrators, and individuals or organizations wishing to arrange special events that incorporate imaginative problem solving and team building.

The ideal usability test would serve these varied user groups by incorporating use case scenarios typical of all three.

Team and Role

As part of a four-person design team, I completed heuristic analysis to hone in on productive test scenarios. I moderated three remote test sessions with volunteer participants, and one in-lab session. As a group, we conducted 14 test sessions in total. My insights and recommendations are my own. I also undertook a limited redesign of the homepages of the main site and registration environment, and built a light prototype.

The Process

What exists

A technical constraint during this project was the required third-party registration environment, powered by ASAP Connected. ASAP Connected offers some customization to its customers, but the extent to which the Leonardo’s Basement registration page had been customized was an unknown. We started by understanding how the two sites interact.

Preliminary Findings

Preliminary usability issues were identified using Schneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design.

Usability Testing

Next, usability testing with volunteer participants was undertaken to determine whether and to what extent usability was interfering with the client’s goals. Although heuristics analysis is a useful place to start to formulate test goals, usability testing is not undertaken with the intent of proving a hypothesis. Testing goals were written so as to allow broad findings and avoid a designer bias toward preliminary usability findings.

We formulated four specific test goals to serve the client and their primary users:

To evaluate the extent to which users feel informed about available programs
To evaluate the ease with which users navigate the registration process for a given event or class
To understand how users navigate between Leonardo’s site and the third party registration site
To identify opportunities to improve content strategy on Leonardo’s site and 3rd party registration site

Methods

14 participants were given two scenarios to work through on the existing Leonardo’s site and third party registration site. 4 sessions were conducted in-lab. A moderator and notetaker sat alongside the participant, with two team members observing and recording from an adjacent room. 10 sessions were conducted remotely, with participants connecting to the research team from their home computers via a screen-sharing platform.

Participants

In-lab participants were recruited from among subscribers to a community Slack channel. They were primarily members of the design community, but they had no familiarity with the Leonardo’s Basement website. Remote volunteers were recruited from among the design team’s network of friends and family, and were almost exclusively non-designers. All participants were adults.

Participants were asked to complete two scenarios:

Scenario 1: Find and register for a morning class that looks fun and appropriate for you and a child.
Scenario 2: You would like to book Leonardo’s Basement for a private event with a group of adults. Show me how you would go about finding information on group activities at Leonardo’s.

Scenarios were self-directed. The test moderator did not explain to the participants how to go about completing the associated tasks. Participants were asked to “think aloud” throughout their execution of each scenario. Their comments about frustration, success, and interest in content were important qualitative data.

Additionally, we paused participants on completion of tasks related to each scenario to ask reflective questions.

These gave us helpful insight to the user experience, especially where it served the client goal of communicating their values as an organization.

Findings and Design Recommendations

Finding: Navigation Dead Ends
Between the home site and third party registration site, multiple pathways were presented to users wishing to find a specific class. However, some pages of the home site were merely informational and did not link directly to registration, with the result that users had to “back out” of a dead end and try another pathway. In other cases, users found references to a specific class, with no direct link to the details and registration page for that class.

Recommendations

Finding: Inconsistent Categorization of Classes
Users found it difficult to identify the same classes on the calendar, homepage, and third-party registration site.

Recommendation
Simplify the categories and use the same categories in all three places. Recommended categories: Kids, Teens, Adults, Families.

Finding: Class Details Difficult to Scan and Compare
Users expressed frustration when trying to quickly identify important information such as time, date, and age group throughout the course catalog.

Finding: No Call-to-Action for Users Planning Group Events
The third-party registration site does not serve this use case, and users had to hunt to find out that they could call and speak with a staff member to design a custom group event.

Recommendation: Include Calls-to-Action for All Primary Users
Give group event planners, such as teachers and corporations, a call-to-action on the home page to communicate that custom events are a significant part of Leonardo’s Basement services.

Conclusion

The design team hopes that these recommendations position Leonardo’s Basement for growth and support the launch of effective advertising campaigns. Our research focused on those features to which changes are easily implementable, and which will create a significant impact on the usability of the Leonardo’s homepage and navigation between it and the course catalog.

Limitations

Leonardo’s Basement may not have control over many features of the third party registration site. Likely, they are limited in the extent to which they can request customization within the registration environment. Additionally, aspects of the account registration process and class sign-up are probably constrained by educational safety concerns and limitation of liability (for example, the breadth of information required during account creation, such as information on food allergies and learning differences and disabilities). Our testing did not include the creation of a user account on the ASAP Connected registration site, or the input of payment information.

View the Prototype

My limited clickable prototype of the two sites’ homepages, annotated and demonstrating recommendations I identified above, is available here.