Usability Testing for Canadian War Museum: Driving Success

Government Organization makes History more Accessible with UX Audit

The Challenge

The Canadian War Museum and its counterpart, the Canadian Museum of History, are essential branches of Government funded organizations that share and educate Canadians on the events, personalities, and historical currents that have shaped Canada. The two entities selected Idea Theorem to complete a comprehensive high-level evaluation of their company websites.

Our high-level UX analysis aimed to provide a concise overview of results based on the evaluations gathered from CWM’s content audit, heuristic evaluation, UX/UI analysis, and accessibility analysis. This report highlighted key findings of the highest priority, from website strengths to improvements/recommendations. We made several recommendations and completed reports detailing ways to improve their website's user experience.

Idea Theorem™ was tasked with reimagining the user experience of their complex portal product, which had multiple personas and several workflows involved. The objective was to create a personalized user experience for each individual persona.

Our Approach

Content Audit

The content audit helps review all available content, find any gaps in the content, and understand how well it aligns with audience needs. It also covers what types of content receive the most engagement, what types receive the least, and how to improve engagement if necessary.

Heuristic Evaluation

The heuristic evaluations help identify and example usability issues and compare them with accepted usability principles. This tool helps make issues more addressable and solvable throughout our process. “Heuristics” are general principles used in interactive design to ensure usability and provide a relatively simple and quick testing regime to identify problems and possible solutions.

UX/UI Analysis

This report focuses on highlighting the UX/UI issues on the Canadian War Museum website. The evaluation was based on an overview of the user flows regarding the main user goals and UX/UI components, such as buttons, paragraphs, hyperlinks, menus, and so on, to further define the issues and provide solutions. This was based on UX/UI best practices, accessibility guidelines, and usability principles.

Accessibility Analysis

This report demonstrates the accessibility issues on the Canadian War Museum website. The WCAG guidelines were considered when identifying the issues, and the web accessibility evaluation tool was used for the analysis. Here are a few examples of the accessibility fixes we recommended

The Outcome

After completing these evaluations, we were left with the results and findings from the reports, which we compiled into a complete overview of the potential improvements and changes to be made by the CWM/CHM team. Our recommendations were successfully applied to their website and were received well by their users.