College of Engineering Unit:
The Micronutrient Information Center (MIC) at Oregon State University's Linus Pauling Institute, provides high quality information and research on micronutrients through their website. This project focused on improving the user experience of the website by understanding the current users--and ultimately implementing some solutions through code.
To learn about our users and issues within the website, we conducted some cognitive walkthroughs using GenderMag--putting ourselves in the user's shoes-and ran some user surveys. Using this information we designed several prototypes for the improved website. This also informed the design for the custom tech solution.
One usability issue we focused on was how users seeking a definition to a key word were redirected to a different 'glossary' page, making the experience inconvenient. We developed an API to address this by storing definitions of the glossary page in a SQL database. Then, we made a website feature to provide definitions whenever terms were hovered over, as opposed to redirecting the user to the glossary page.
