Macmillan cancer Support

How might we streamline the sign-up experience of a fundraising event website?

World’s Biggest Coffee Morning (WBCM) is a key fundraising event of Macmillan Cancer Support that enables people to make donations through hosting or joining a coffee morning. To attract future fundraisers, Macmillan Cancer Support wanted to make sure they offer seamless sign-up experience.

users and technology

USER: General public based in the UK
TECHNOLOGY: Website (Macmillan Cancer Support World's Biggest Coffee Morning)

problem

Macmillan needed to understand how users go about signing up to host a World's Biggest Coffee Morning and make donations, all online

goals

To explore user experience and usability issues during signing up, donating and finding recipes
Suggest improvements based on identified pain points
Although out of scope of this project, I would add increasing the number of sign-up together with estimated increase of donation as measurable goals and obtain the baseline before starting the project

research questions

How do users find information needed to sign-up to host a WBCM?
How easy/difficult for users to sign up to host an event?
How easy/difficult for users to pay in money raised online?
How easy/difficult for users to find a recipe they want to use?
What are the key messages users receive when they visit the homepage?

research design

Evaluative and exploratory | Usability testing | Sample size: 8 | Team size: 1

Recruiting participants

I recruited participants through convenient sampling. While there is no demographic criteria, I limited to those who have never participated WBCM before in order to understand how first-time users go about signing up on the website. As a result 8 participants aged between 20s to 59 were recruited.

Impression test

I chose to conduct 15-second impression test to explore first-time users' understanding of the value proposition of WBCM website. I also included a quick terminology test if the terms used in the Homepage were intuitive and matching users' mental model.

Think-aloud usability testing

I created task scenarios aiming to observe contextualised user actions, such as "You've heard of WBCM while watching BBC news and decided to give it a try at your office." Then I asked users to 1) try finding out how WBCM works, 2) Sign up, 3) Find a recipe, and 4) Make a donation.

Post-task SEQ and Post-session SUS

After each task, I asked Single Ease Questionnaire (SEQ) to measure users' perceived ease of each task. At the end of usability testing, I administered System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire to triangulate the findings.

key findings

Participants had to visit different sections repeatedly to collect and memorise information about how to host a WBCM
While participants found the processes of signing up and paying in straightforward, the lack of clear and consistent guidance made user confused and frustrated.
Participants experienced difficulties locating a recipe just by browsing and scrolling. One participant even gave up halfway through.

design Recommendation

Consider adding a quick overview of how to host a WBCM (as shown in the recommended design)
Consider choosing intuitive labelling
Consider increasing clarity by giving consistent guidance
Consider adding human values as requirements and evaluation criteria

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As is

Most participants tried to grasp how to host a coffee morning by holding the drop-down menu as this was the only place that showed users how to host in one go.

To be

Adding an overview of how to host a coffee morning would reduce user efforts to understand what it takes before deciding to sign-up.

Result

37 usability issues were found. (Severity Level 1: 2 issues, Severity Level 2: 16 issues, Severity Level 3: 4 issues, Severity Level 4: 15 issues)
We presented the results to client stakeholders and some of the key issues found have been reflected in the current redesign
Had I been given access to business data, I would have tracked business values such as increase in sign-ups and increased revenue (donation).

Reflection

Combining SUS/SEQ with thinkaloud usability testing produced meaningful data revealing participants' frustrations despite the subjective ease of task completion.
To quantify and assess effectiveness of design change as well as to get more insights from the existing user behaviour, it could have been useful if we had access to website analytics beforehand.

Voice of participants

“Just give me a step-to-step guide of how to do it, instead of having everything separated out in like six different pages.”

“It’s confusing, I’m not quite sure, it could either mean we have to pay a fee in order to join up for a coffee morning?”

“There’s no way of searching the product, or filters? That would be quite convenient. A lot of scrolling up.”

team

Myself (Planning, recruiting, moderation/interview guide, moderation/interviewing, prompts design, project management, presenting, research paper writing)

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