Enhancing Program Discovery on an Outdoor Recreation Website
Pro Bono Project
My Role
UX Researcher (Team of 5 UX Researchers)
Research Methods
Desk Research, Competitive Analysis & Critical User Journey, User Interviews
Duration
1 month
Background
Do you notice that boys tend to participate in outdoor activities more than girls?
Women’s Wilderness is a Colorado nonprofit organization that has helped girls, women, and LGBTQ+ people find their voice in the outdoors since 1998.
During a one-month timeframe, I collaborated with four other UX researchers to investigate how prospective participants discovered and registered for programs. Ultimately, we wanted to answer:
How might we help visitors easily discover outdoor programs that align with their interests while navigating the Women’s Wilderness website? What could be improved about their website?
Our research highlighted three opportunities to improve program discovery and registration:
- Clarify program labels
- Improve program filtering
- Communicate registration availability clearly
Process
Desk Research
When you first land on their landing page, they have a large video playing of outdoor experiences at the front to catch your attention. Especially if you live in Colorado, the Colorado mountains in the video will give you a sense of familiarity. They also use a handwritten font and display photos of a diverse range of individuals who have participated in the activities. Overall, my initial thought was that it was a very welcoming site with a lot of outdoor program activities offered.
Competitive Analysis & Critical User Journey
We compared Women’s Wilderness to Backcountry Beauties. Each of us put ourselves in a user's shoes to complete a task that we thought most of the users would need to go through.
I was responsible for searching for a specific program and event, and this is what I uncovered:
Women’s Wilderness had multiple adult program categories targeting adults. First-time users may need some time to fully understand the differences between each category. Backcountry Beauties listed all of their activities, making it easier for users to see what they have offered at once.
Women’s Wilderness Backcountry Beauties Both organizations display events that have already closed registration or have ended. However, Backcountry Beauties allows users to join a waitlist for these events.
Backcountry Beauties Women’s Wilderness included the program details, such as price, date, and location, in the previews, which is something Backcountry Beauties does not provide.
User Interview and Analysis
To deeply understand how users can easily discover outdoor programs that they are interested in on the website, we conducted usability interviews with 6 potential participants, asking them to complete website tasks and answer interview questions around these 3 topics:
(Select a topic below to scroll to the corresponding findings and recommendations.)
- Site navigation and other information exploration
- Activities and programs discovery
- Activity Registration
After collecting the recordings from the user interviews, we categorized their responses and developed a color scheme for each category to analyze and synthesize the research findings:
Findings and Recommendations
1. Site navigation and other information exploration
A few participants were unsure whether “Adult Programs” and “Adult Courses” referred to the same offerings. The navigation used “Adult Programs” and “FAQ – Adult Courses,” while the homepage grouped offerings under “Courses.”
We recommended using consistent terminology for the same offerings across navigation, headings, and FAQs.
2. Activities and programs discovery
Some participants wanted to combine activity, age, and program-type filters to narrow the available options. We recommended supporting these combined criteria to shorten the program discovery time.
3. Activity Registration
Some participants encountered events that were no longer accepting registrations.
Suggestion 1: We recommended clearly displaying registration status and replacing unavailable registration actions with an appropriate next step.
Suggestion 2: For sold-out upcoming events, this could include a cancellation waitlist; for completed events or passed deadlines, it could include related programs or notifications about future dates.
Client response
The pro-bono client was highly satisfied with the UX research report.
I’m just really appreciative for all the work that you did. [...] We are honored that you chose us. You answered my questions, our questions in such detail - it gives us a really clear path forward for any number of things we want to follow through on. [..] It’s great to also know that you aren’t too far off from cleaning it up, we don’t need to do a big overhaul; so that’s very exciting!
Kriste + Women’s Wilderness
Limitations
- During the competitive analysis, if we could compare multiple competitors, in addition to Backcountry Beauties, we would gain a more comprehensive understanding of other Colorado-based organizations.
- We didn’t have any parent participants to conduct usability interviews with, which meant we missed their perspective on this audience segment.
- We did not conduct follow-up usability testing to evaluate whether our recommendations improved program discovery or registration clarity.