Usability and Cornell

Cornell University is an institution located in Ithaca, New York. It is a private research university as well as a partner to the State University of New York (SUNY). Because of this, Cornell is unique as it caters to a diverse group of students and contributes to a plethora of fields of study. It’s focus is to prioritize “public engagement to help improve the quality of life in our state, the nation, the world”, as stated on the landing page of their website.

When I conducted a usability test with a user who could be categorized as a prospective parent to a future Cornell student, they described their first impression of the website as vibrant, clear, and comprehensible. They were impressed by the clean organization of the site and felt that the navigation was very user friendly and made the user feel comfortable with locating the needed information on the site.

The user was prompted to locate the school mascot, nearest airport, and whether Arabic was offered at the school. All information was quickly found in 5 clicks or less. However, the mascot was not explicitly displayed, but the user noticed that a bear was seen in sports photographs and subtly shown throughout the site, which can attribute to Cornell’s more sophisticated approach to their website and overall reputation as a respected institution. The user was able to locate the the foreign languages offered at the school through the Asian Studies link within the Academics tab. The languages included Bengali, Chinese, and Sanskrit; however Arabic was not in the list.

Frustration did occur when I asked the user to identify the closest airport to Cornell. Once found, the user could have reached the answer within 4 clicks, however, the user was tempted to click around for this task and it took longer than expected. When the user arrived on the Cornell Maps page, they did not immediately understand how to use the left side map navigation menu, and described it as ‘confusing’. They instead chose to click the “visiting” button underneath the map, which led him to a page with choices like, “FlyIthaca” which took him out the Cornell website. The user decided to return to the Cornell Maps page, and use the “search maps” tool to type in ‘airport’ , which located the airport on the map. Using the zoom out tool, he was able to see the location of the airport in relation to the university.

Although Cornell’s website is relatively easy to use , and the user was able to navigate the website with ease, there is always room for improvement. So I decided to make small tweaks to optimize the user’s experience. First, I decided to add a secondary logo to the navigation header that included the school’s mascot. This logo would be smaller than the Cornell logo. I feel that a mascot is a live logo and an identifying factor of a school and should be displayed on it’s website, especially on the landing page.

Secondly, I decided to add a “Getting Here” button to the map sidebar menu on the Cornell Maps page, next to the “layers” and “locations” buttons to make transportation points easily to find without having to type it in the search or navigate off the website. With the “Getting Here” option, once clicked, location pins would appear on the map showing the nearby airport, Amtrak and bus stations, as well as major highways.

Through this activity, I realized that many insights are gained though usability testing. And through these insights, micro-interactions can be designed and user’s experience can be optimized. I also observed how the user was tempted to click around the page even though they knew that the options being clicked wouldn’t lead them to the target point. This aspect of usability testing can optimize design by removing “distractors” or adding focal points to increase traffic. Usability testing also solidified my understanding of “fail fast”, as I was able to quickly use data to create a cheap paper prototype for the re-design.

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