LACMA Website Usability Testing Report

Project Overview

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) was closed due to COVID-19 and started curating art exhibitions and hosting events online. In order to create positive museum experience for LACMA’s virtual visitors, I conducted a heuristic evaluation and a usability test on their website to discover their the users’ pain points when finding information about artworks, museum events, and educational resources. Lastly, I proposed some design solutions that could improve the user experience.

 

Client: N/A (personal project)

Team: N/A (individual project)

My Responsibilities: User testing & interviews, and UX design

Duration: 3 weeks (November 2020)

Tools: UserZoom Go, Adobe XD, and Google Sheets

Project Goal

Allow LACMA website visitors to find information about the artwork and/or events that they’re interested in as well as educational resources easily and quickly.

Heuristic Evaluation Findings

First, I performed Heuristic Evaluation / Expert Review on the website using Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics to identify some obvious UX/UI flaws.

Flaw 1: Some buttons and links might not be perceived as clickable due to the lack of visual feedback.

Heuristics used: Visibility of Systems Status & Recognition Rather Than Recall

Flaw 2: It’s hard for users to tell where they are on the website.

Heuristics used: Visibility of Systems Status

Flaw 3: Some art/museum jargons used on the website might make information difficult to find or understand.

Heuristics used: Match Between System and the Real World

Flaw 4: The navigation inside individual pages lacks consistency.

Heuristics used: Consistency and Standards

Usability Testing

Overview

  • Conducted 5 remote moderated testing sessions over UserZoom Go.

    • Users aged 21-29. Included undergraduate students, graduate students, and working professionals.

  • Each session last for 45-60 minutes.

  • In each session, user was asked to perform 12 tasks and answer 5 post-testing user satisfaction questions.

User Data

I created a task list and conducted remote moderated testing with 5 users using Userzoom Go. Here is the data I collected through the 5 testing sessions:

Metric 1: Time Performance

Metric 2: Task Performance

Key Findings

The following tasks had the lowest success rate & took users the longest time to complete:

  1. Find all the artworks created by the artist Andy Warhol.

  2. Please find information about school visits.

  3. Please tell me what medium was used in David Hockney’s painting California Copied from 1965 Painting in 1987.

Key Problems & Design Solutions

After comparing and analyzing the results from heuristic evaluation and usability testing, I identified some key problems with this website’s current user experience and came up with design solutions for each of them.

Exhibition Page

Collection Page

Artwork Details Page - Description Section

Event Calendar Page

Learn Tab - Menu Items

Takeaway

I learned that it is beneficial to do a heuristic evaluation / expert review before the user-based testing, because I was able to find some potential problems that guided me to create testing tasks for the users. Subsequently, the problems that were found and assumptions that were made from the heuristic evaluation can be approved or disapproved by being compared and contrasted with the findings from user-based testing. Most importantly, user-based testing is valuable and necessary, as it can identify problems that experts would not have thought of as well as help designers create a more user-centered product.