The Department of Education and Training engaged Parisfirst to improve the Department’s public website. The focus of the improvement project was the website’s information architecture, interaction design and visual design.

Parisfirst was brought onboard to carry out two rounds of usability testing. The first round of testing was conducted before any changes were made to the Department’s public website (education.vic.gov.au), and a second round was then conducted after the DET digital team had updated the site. Testing took place at the purpose built University of Melbourne Usability Design labs.

Round one

Forty participants were recruited by Parisfirst to take part in round one of scenario-based usability testing. This group of 40 consisted of six representative audience segments, including students, parents and educational professionals. Testing focused on the usability of the website and how participants interacted with the information architecture and overall design. This first round of testing provided:

• a baseline score for each task
• an overall SUS (System Usability Scale) score
• a baseline score for usability, learnability and attitude gained from Semantic Attitudinal scale-based questions.

Parisfirst presented test findings and recommendations for DET to consider and incorporate into their website changes.

Round two

The second round of usability testing took place a few months after round one and provided an opportunity to validate website changes to the information architecture, interaction design and visual design. The various scores from round one were also compared to round two scores to measure improvement.

Round two repeated the testing approach and again included 40 participants.

Parisfirst presented project findings and further recommendations to DET based on round two outcomes, which included quantitative and qualitative data along with observed behavioural evidence.