In collaboration with three other evaluators, a heuristic evaluation was conducted on the SkillsCommons website from the view point of “novice” users. A three-part evaluation was completed by independently reviewing the homepage, the overall website, and the primary individual pages of the site. The homepage was evaluated using Nielsen’s guidelines for homepage usability, and all webpages were evaluated using all ten of Nielsen’s (1995) heuristic guidelines.

Recommendations were provided, and all severe violations were corrected by the SkillsCommons team.

A lab user testing evaluation method was employed to identify usability problems in the SkillsCommons website. The user testing process began with journey mapping and persona development based on user needs analysis and goals directed from the client. Five tasks were developed for each user persona in order to evaluate different pages and functions within the SkillsCommons website. The website’s interface was evaluated by having participants perform each of these tasks using the think aloud protocol and provide feedback in terms of their opinions of the interface.

Morae was used for this evaluation to capture and record the screen, as well as record the participants’ voices and facial expressions. To communicate with the participants throughout the user testing session, Google Hangouts was connected between the participant computer and the viewing computer behind two-way glass, and notes were taken in the viewing room.

Demographic data were collected using a pre-test questionnaire, and the system usability scale was used to collect post-test usability data.

The goal of this project was to improve the usability and functionality of the online courses in the SkillsCommons database that have been imported into Blackboard for course management. In order to improve course usability, we went through roughly 300 courses and added detailed descriptions, reorganized content, and standardized the layout of all courses to be consistent across the platform. As a result, the users are better able to access course materials, navigate the standardized course layout, and understand course requirements and expectations.

In order to evaluate the courses consistently across all CUDA course administrators, I created a checklist of requirements, as well as instructions for how to complete each section. Courses were given a welcome message and the stock SkillsCommons FAQ (provided to us by the client) inside of an announcements section, as well as course description, and a link to download material in SkillsCommons.

Courses were also checked for empty folders, and unnecessary or excessive nesting was removed. Items with attachments that were word documents were downloaded and converted to PDFs. Links were renamed from “index.html” to have more descriptive text that is also accessible [e.g., Unit 4 Reading: Hydroponics (HTML)]. Broken links were reported or corrected. Issues discovered through review were noted in a Google sheet shared between CUDA and the SkillsCommons dev team.