The problem
Feedback from users showed that they wanted to donate to a general ‘theme’ such as gardens or coast, or to the general fund for a specific property rather than a particular appeal. The first was never possible, the second was sometimes possible but wasn’t always easy to find.
The solution
The solution was to provide a mechanism on the general donate page that would allow people to either select a theme or search for a place. An MVP was designed for this where we ran some basic usability tests. These showed up some issues but it was decided to implement it anyway and then run further tests on Axure prototypes as enhancements once the product was live and we could gather some more quantitative feedback.
User testing
I ran successive rounds of testing on UserZoom with remote, unmoderated sessions where users were asked to perform a couple of simple tasks:
- To find a piece of information describing how donations were used within a theme
- To search for a National Trust place rather than a theme
After each task, users were asked a single ease question to score the task from 1 (Vey difficult) through to 5 (Very easy).
You can view the latest prototype here:
https://fg7sib.axshare.com/#id=g4xcp4&p=theme_choice&c=1
This prototype also uses quite complex repeater to autocomplete the search if you try and search for a National Trust property.
The current page is here:
https://secure.nationaltrust.org.uk/donate/personal-details
These were the results (the percentages don’t add up due to the way that UserZoom rounds up/down in their reporting):
Version 1 had a small (i) icon that showed a popup with the description
Version 2 had the description permanently under the circular image
Version 3 has the description hidden behind a click so the user has to select a theme to see it.
I ran this test twice just to make sure it wasn’t an anomaly as it didn’t seem an intuitive ‘winner’ to make the user select a theme before they saw information that would help them make a decision
First run:
Second run:
Obviously, the last iteration – the one in the prototype linked above – is the winner and my prototype is now being used as the model for the developers to follow over coming sprints.