1 Drew Curry Research Methods - 5503 Dr. Anne Streeter June 29, 2016 Assistance Website Research Report Executive Summary: When you think of the basic necessities that every person is entitled to you probably think of things like food, clothing, shelter, hygiene, education, and health care. Many of us don’t think of these things often because they are readily available to us whenever we need or want them. Out of food? You can just run to the grocery store and pick up what you want. Need a shower? Just walk into your bathroom and take one. These are luxuries that we take for granted but not everyone has access to. There are a lot of organizations that serve to help people meet their basic needs. However, locating the sites where you can get assistance is not always easy. Typically, people learn of places they can receive help from by two main methods, word of mouth or through pamphlets and flyers. In this digital age why are the methods of finding out about where you can get assistance so archaic? Because there is not good centralized database of this information. Most sites post their hours and location on their personal sites or social media. This is great, but the problem is most of these are not search engine optimized and unless you search for them specifically by name you may need to dig through pages of results to find the relevant information you need.
2 The site I sat out to create which I call The Basics sets out to be a gathering space for people who need help to come and find all the information they need in one location. It will also serve assistance site administrator in getting their information out there so they can help more people as well as giving people who want to volunteer a way to find out how to get involved. We were meant to help others and I hope that above all else this site will do just that. Project Overview and Procedures: This project serves as a platform that allowed me to build and test what I believe to be a much needed service. Throughout this project I used many methods to discover and flesh out the the look and feel of my eventual final product. I started with interviews of 5 different people who are involved in running assistance sites or assistance programs of some sort. I wanted to get their opinions on what they wanted from a site and what they felt the people who already use their assistance site might want from a website such as mine. These interviews pointed out key features I need to include like a simple way to add your assistance site, as well as the need to add a required documentation section to the assistance site page. I will touch on later, in the Limitations section on why I didn’t interview the people getting assistance themselves. After the interviews I developed SWOT Analysis and a Competitive Analysis which can be found in the Appendix at the end of this document. The SWOT Analysis created realistic expectations and gave me parameters to work within on this project. It also helped to give my project direction by helping me identify the strengths and opportunities and maintaining them while trying to improve on my perceived weakness and threats. The Competitive Analysis provided me with an overview of what I perceived
3 to be the three best sites that currently are doing something similar to what I had set out to accomplish. After developing an information architecture, I developed a wireframe model which you can find an example of in the appendix. This lead to my first round of User Testing. For this first round I had five people, including some that I had interviewed, sit down and take a look at my most basic prototype. After these test the feedback was taken and a more high fidelity prototype was built that was taken out and tested again by five new potential users. Finally after these result were in, I was able to build my final high-fidelity prototype, which is the final product I am presenting to you today. Participant Profiles: The participant in my study were all people who run assistance sites or programs, or are in some way affiliated with an assistance site, for example volunteering or donating regularly. As I have mentioned before, I will speak to why I was unable to include people who use assistance sites in my research in the Limitations section. However, since I was not able to interview or test them appropriately I built personas that represent their interest in the project and helped drive some decisions. These personas can be found in the Appendix. The people I interviewed and tested are as follows: (I = Interview; T1 = First User Test; T2 = Second User Test)
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Hayley Curry - Church Member - T1 Rhonda Day - Morris Chapel Food Pantry Coordinator - I; T2 Amy Jo Whicker - Operation Shoebox Coordinator - I; T1 Angie Briles - Backpack Program Coordinator - I; T2 Megan Smoot - Co-Jamaican Mission Coordinator - I; T1
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TJ Smoot - Co-Jamaican Mission Coordinator - I; T2 Krista Lyons - School Teacher - T1 Dan Lyons - Pastor - T2 Nicole Johnson - Sustainability Specialist - T1 Bruce Johnson - Pastor - T2
Limitations: There are two main limitations to my study, the first of which was the inability to interview or test my website on anyone who is actually in need and in search of assistance. There is one simple reason for this and it is confidentiality. In order to meet with, get information about and interview the people who frequent the the assistance sites and programs of the people I interviewed, I would first have to pass a background check that generally takes between 6-8 weeks to return and that timeframe alone puts this outside of the purview of this class. Not to mention that most people do not like to talk about their need so I would need to go through a lot of potential recruits to be able to get a testable number. The second major limitation on my test and interviews is that they are all located within the same community with many coming from the same church family. This doesn’t give an accurate representation of our potential user base as many will clearly come from outside our community and outside of our state even. For example we live in a rural community between two fairly substantial population centers, this makes us unique and even very different from other rural communities that are largely self-reliant. The race was also an aspect which was definitely not representative of the user base. For my interviews and test I had a split of nine caucasians and one hispanic individual. While since I was not privy to actual number of who uses these services I know from
5 observation this is not representative of the user base. Gender was much closer to being balanced with a break down of seven females to three males. While still not an exact representation of the population, much closer to the true number which would be five of each. Conclusion: While many conclusions could be reached in regards to the design and overall function of the prototype given the user testing that was performed, I fear that any conclusions reached cannot be extrapolated out to speak for the entire user base. This really puts a dampener on results I actually received. I feel like I was only able to get half the story due to timing circumstances that were outside of my control. I would recommend a longer and more in depth study of the website I have developed with a more diverse user base. One that actually represents people who would be using the site to locate assistance instead of people trying to add their own assistance site to the database or finding ways they could help. My other recommendation would be a new and improved competitive analysis. My competitive analysis features three sites that focus mostly or entirely solely on food assistance. I would like to expand this analysis to include companies that primarily provide other types of assistance. Also, I would like to find if there are any sites that bring all of these assistance groups together as I have attempted to do. in my research only a government website had attempted anything like it and it was poorly done which is why I did not include it in my original analysis.
6 Let me close by saying that I think the site I have created and developed can serve a need that is desperately needed in our world. However, given time restraints and because of confidentiality problems I feel like this project can continue to grow into the incredible tool that it is in my mind. Where I am now is an excellent starting point now it is my responsibility to take what I have developed and make it into something that can change the world, or at the very least someone’s life. Appendix: SWOT Analysis:
7 Competitive Analysis:
8 Personas:
9 Wireframe Model Example:
Usability Test 1 Results:
10 Hi-Fidelity Wireframe Model Example:
Usability Test 2 Results:
11 Final Wireframe Model Example: