Grant Consulting

stltoday.com Usability Study

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stltoday.com is one of the most popular web sites based in the St. Louis area. This report lists the main findings of the study, with detail on some issues. Please contact us if you are interested in the full report.

Grant Consulting, Inc. sponsored and conducted this study. stltoday.com and Pulitzer Technologies are not associated in any way with the preparation of the study or the reporting of its results.

Summary

In general, users were successful and satisfied in browsing the main sections of stltoday.com and in finding current stories or features of interest. Most users had a positive experience in finding a used car that met a specific criterion. And the home page made a positive first impression on people. They not only found the page attractive but also recognized the main purpose for the web site.

The greatest difficulty came from finding an archived article about a major St. Louis story. No one was successful in finding and acquiring the article. Most were very frustrated with the task. Their degree of frustration strongly suggests changing the design to accommodate archived search. These results also warrant further study on why in general people use the stltoday.com "Site Search" and how successful they are when they do so.

A number of other opportunities for improvement are identified by this study.

Testers

An independent marketing research firm recruited and compensated all test participants.

The six test participants met the following qualifications:

  • Experienced in using the Web.
  • Lived in the St. Louis area for at least 3 months.
  • Read the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at least weekly.

Three of the participants have little or no previous familiarity with stltoday.com. The other three had moderate or high familiarity with the web site.

Main Issues

Positives

  • Pleased with related links, follow-up emails and contacts
  • Car searches generally successful and well liked
  • Impression from home page positive and basically accurate
  • Detailed content enjoyed by users
  • Photos engaged users and helped navigation
  • Separate job windows for printing liked
  • Main navigation bar worked well
  • Link to featured employer web site liked
  • Mixed comments about download speed

Commentary

This study serves to offer an example of a usability study on a web site from St. Louis and of interest to most St. Louisans. Usability testing offers the best way to directly know what is happening between your customers and your technology.

Many readers of this web site are unfamiliar with usability testing. Of course, if you haven’t been involved with a usability test, you probably wonder whether or not it is worth the time and effort. If that happens to be the case for yourself, the following questions are offered to you:

  • How many of the above findings impact stltoday.com’s customers? stltoday.com’s prospective customers?
  • How many of these findings impact stltoday.com’s business goals? Revenue goals?
  • How many more findings would other usability studies uncover?
  • How many of these current or future usability findings would be recognized through traffic or “hit” reports?   

A future article will discuss design ideas for addressing the usability issues of stltoday.com. If you have any design suggestions for stltoday.com, please send them either to ideas@grantconsulting.com, or use the contact page.

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Difficulties due to unclear or misleading links

Several links on the site were unclear or misled users. For example, some users took the “Desired vehicle is not listed on this page" link to mean that they were not looking at any cars that met their search criteria. In fact, the link simply provides a way to go back to the search page. (Note: This link has been changed since the study was done in early August, and now reads, “Return to Main Search Page".)

Example of misleading link from stltoday.com
From stltoday.com. (The "Desired vehicle..." link has been changed since the study was done.)

Other links that were unclear or misleading include “urban diary,” “Research this vehicle”, and the links that appear at the end of an article to related stories.

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Difficulty selecting muliple criteria

Several people were frustrated that they could not select more than one item from a search criteria list. This especially bothered one user who wanted to select all three models of a car at one time. The instructions which indicated that she should be able to select up to five models especially aggravated her.

Selection control from Autos section of stltoday.com
From Autos section of stltoday.com

In fact, she could have selected all three “Bonneville” models for her search if she had known to press the Control key. However, she and other users did not know about or did not think about using this key.

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No one could find and buy archived story

Testers encountered their most severe problems when they attempted to find an archived story. The scenario asked them to find an article that came out shortly after Mark McGwire's historic 62nd home run. In the scenario, testers were given the correct spelling of McGwire’s name, the fact it was the 62nd home run that broke the single season home run record, and the fact that it occurred in September 1998.

Analysis from people’s behavior indicates that they had to succeed in seven different steps to find and buy an stltoday.com archived story:

  1. Find the page on the site for doing archive searches.
  2. Enter search parameters that would provide relevant returns.
  3. Enter search parameters that would provide a manageable number of returns.
  4. Review the results.
  5. Choose an article.
  6. Provide personal registration and payment information.
  7. Get the desired story and determine if it is satisfactory.

People had severe difficulties with most of these steps. Everyone eventually gave up. The time before they decided to quit ranged from 4 minutes to 28 minutes. Only one person succeeded in finding an archived article that was relevant. However, that person could not get past the registration process.

Another person who gave up on finding an archived story about McGwire’s 62nd home run was instructed to go ahead and read a different archived story. She succeeded in registering herself, making the purchase, and reading that archived story. However, she felt “cheated” with the story purchased. The story had no real content, only captions to pictures that were not displayed.

Most people had significant difficulty finding the section for doing archives. Many of them started with the assumption that they could use the prominent “Site Search” bar on the home page. Others assumed that they could find an archive story about McGwire if they went to the Sports section or pages dedicated to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team or Mark McGwire. In fact, the place to start finding archived stories is in the News section, under “P-D Archives”.


From stltoday.com

People expected an “Archives” subsection in Sports, and looked for it in the right navigation bar or at the bottom of the page.

The reader is invited to go to stltoday.com and to find an article published shortly after McGwire’s 62nd home run. If you want to see how to find it, the answer is provided here for your convenience, along with examples of searches done by the testers in the study.

 

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Scenario to find and buy archived story

The following scenario was used during the stltoday.com usability study. Due to difficulties in using the web site, no one was able to completely perform the scenario successfully.

You just spoke on the phone with a New York customer who happens to be a big baseball fan. During this conversation, he wondered if there was any way you could send to him an article that appeared in the St. Louis newspapers the day after the historic 62th home run of Mark McGwire.

You decide to go to stltoday.com to find a good article that covered the event that day. You don't recall the exact day of McGwire's home run, but you do remember that it happened in September 1998, and that it was the 62nd home run that broke the record for home runs in one season.

Since it is an old article, you expect that you might have to pay for it, and you have a credit card handy to do so.

You plan to print the article and mail it to your client.

  • Go to stltoday.com
  • Find an article that covered Mark McGwire's 62nd home run.
  • Make sure the article appeared at the time of the home run.
  • You recall the home run occurred in September 1998.
  • Print it.

 

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How to find McGwire's 62nd home run

To go to the archives search page

  • Go to the News section through the top navigation bar
  • Go to PD Archives through the right navigation bar.
or

From stltoday archive search
From stltoday.com

Below are some examples of the searches done during the study from either “site search” or the Archives search page. These searches did not lead to success for the users.

  • mark mcquire
  • news article on mark mcgwire's 62ndhomerun
  • homerun
  • september 1998
  • Mark McGwire 62nd home run
  • mark mc
  • mark mcgwire's 62nd home run
  • McGwire 62nd Home Run (This returned search results with articles on Real Estate.)

 

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Photos engaged users and helped navigation

Photos on stltoday.com added to user experience
From stltoday.com

Almost everyone had good things to say about the photos on the website related to particular articles and stories. As one person said, “Photos are a sure way to get attention.” Photos helped people choose which story or feature they wanted to read. And people appreciated the fact that the photos themselves were hyperlinks to the detailed content.

It is worth noting that no one complained that any photo seemed out of place. And no one said the photos were not worth the download time and the space taken on the page. Such complaints are often made during other web site studies.

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Written by Joe Grant
Grant Consulting, Inc.
Posted on August 30, 2001

 

Grant Consulting, Inc.
located in metro St. Louis, MO, USA
1013 Bradington Court
Columbia, IL 62236
info@grantconsulting.com
(314) 581-0384
Copyright © 2003 by Grant Consulting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.