REI Campgrounds

A usability study completed over 10 weeks as part of my Masters program. My group teamed up with REI to look at their new campgrounds page and find the ways in which it did and didn't meet their users' needs.

Interaction Map

My team began by plotting and visualizing all the major interaction points that could occur on the REI Campgroupnds page.

Through this interaction map, we were better able to see the core workflows that people would typically go through while navigating the site.

Study Goals

With a better understanding of the site layout and after talking with REI, we created our goals for the study.

We first wanted to assess the discoverability of the Camping Project site from the REI homepage. Furthermore, we wanted to assess the usability of the Camping Project site based on amenities and features important to our individual participants.

Study Recruitment

Using Google Forms, we created a screener questionnaire to help recruit our participants.

We were primarily looking for people that were interested in camping in established campgrounds and had some amount of camping experience

We recruited a total of 8 participants with a variety of camping experience.

Methodology

We created two tasks that assessed the goals of our usability study based on the following prompts:

Scenario: You and a friend are planning a camping trip for a weekend in May

Task 1: From the REI Homepage, navigate to a section that would allow you to search for a place to camp.

Task 2: From the REI Camping Project page, search for a campground based on your preferences.

The usability studies took place in a private study room in Odegaard Library and consisted of one participant, one moderator, and one note taker. Each session was scheduled for an hour and consisted of six distinct parts:

1. Introduction and Waiver

2. Pre-Task Questions

3. Task 1

4. Task 2

5. Post-Task Likert Questionnaire

6. Post-Task Interview Questions

Findings

The chart shows the overall success rates of our participants related to the study goals we created.

After analyzing all of our participant data, we identified a total of 10 major usability issues.