Usability
Test Results

Overview

Team: Maurilio, Mike, and Caroline

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website proved to have a mostly elegant and functional design. However, our test user identified two main issues that keep the user from having the best experience while on the website. From these findings, we reccomned for the CDC to reorganize the menu bar at the top of the website and modernize the search box.

Navigate Home

👍 1 second

CDC logo.

Our first case asked the test user to navigate from a different page on the CDC website back to the home page. This task ran very smoothy and proved to be very intuitive. Our test user simply clicked on the CDC logo in the top left of the page to go back home.

Change Language

1 second 👍

Change language option.

Secondly, we asked the test user to change the language of the home screen. To do so, the user found the languages button in the top right of the page and changed the page into Spanish.

Find Job Application

👎 10 seconds

Job app.

Next, we asked our test user to find the job application form to apply to work for the CDC. This task took considerably more effort than the first two tasks. Our test user had to look through all the tabs in the main menu for the application only to find the CDC Jobs page hidden in the ‘More’ tab. Additionally, other members of this usabiltiy group expressed how they might have missed the job application if encountering the webiste for the first time.

Locate Press Releases

👎 5 seconds

Press release section.

We asked the test user to find the latest CDC press release on the site. Our user came across the press release relatively quickly in the News section of the home page. However, the test user expressed confusion about wether or not it was considered a press release because it looked like a calendar or event list.

Get COVID-19 Info

👎1 minute

Covid section.

Finally, we asked our test user to find COVID-19 regional case data since we assumed that users of the CDC website might be interested in referencing statistics the pandemic. This task took the longest by far of any of our test cases. Our user used the search bar and then had to scroll through a few article options before they reached the correct one.

Recomendations

1. We recomend for the CDC to add auto-complete capability to the search bar. Locating articles about COVID cases could have been much easier if correct searches were popping up as options as the test user typed.

2. We suggest to reorganize the menu bar at the top of the home screen. Based on the test users comments, it would be effective to have a stats toggle in addition to a careers tab. Overall, we found only having four tabs in addition to the ‘More’ tab to be too broad to guess what could be contained in each.