Foreign Affairs User Interviews
What is Foreign Affairs Magazine?
Like it’s name suggests, Foreign Affairs is an American magazine that focuses on international relations and foreign policy. It is different than most magazines because it is published by Council on Foreign Relations, a nonprofit nonpartisan think tank and the articles tend to be 3,000 words long.
Current Users' Interviews
Before me, Foreign Affairs had never conducted an usability test. They had marketing research and other data collected from the site but never had someone sit down with different types of users to watch them go through the site. When I was first hired, I decided to do a full body check up to discover the pain points and recommend a course of treatment. I jumped off the sprint with current user interviews.
The Set Up
The study was set up into two parts. 1st part was to understand why the readers subscribed to Foreign Affairs Magazine. Then I had the users walk me through how they used the site. Even though this was a more free form part of the interview, I had prepared tasks for the users to do depending on how they approached the site. For example, if the user usually enters the site through the newsletter, I had them open the newsletter to go to the site.
Results
Right after I conducted the current users interviews, I set up a number of usability tests for new users. I combined the two results to strategize the redesign of the site.
Synthesis
One of the biggest problems I saw was that both current users and new users had a problem with searching. I had one current user tell me at the very beginning of the interview that he simply gets lost. Another user was a teacher, and I had her look up different articles for her lesson plan. In the end she couldn't find articles on half of the topics.
The Story of Malvin
He always keeps track of the newsletters. When he has the time, he will click on a newsletter's story to enter the site to read the article.
Once he finishes that article, he wants to read another from a previous newsletter but then can never find it. Because he is lost, he has a hard time articulating the actual source of the issue.
I believe that he gets stuck either in the magazine section or on the landing page and doesn't make the distinction between the two.
The Story of Heather
Heather is a school teacher and uses Foreign Affairs to find articles to give to her students. She hadn’t searched on the website for a while but she was very familiar with the content.
Even though she was on a desktop version of the site, she had such a small browser open that the website was in a responsive state.
Since she taught American history, we decided to find some articles on the US constitution. Heather was initially able to use the nav bar to find the American history section. She tried to use the filters but could figure out how to close them until I had to step in and help. Then she was disappointed because the algorithm pulled articles about Poland's and Austria's constitution but no the US's. She tried to search again but couldn't figure out how to use the nav bar to search deeper into the content.
Actions
The current user interviews was the first piece of information that we collected before the redesign. This data snowballed into other qualitative tests, surveys, lean sprints and A/B tests. It is hard to pinpoint the exact results because these interviews influenced everything. But basically here is all of the work that did happen as a result
- Navigation bar redesign
- Modified algorithm
- Homepage redesign
- Landing page redesign (including new filters)
- Share features improved
- Highlighting the audio