User testing service for the Scottish Qualification Authority.

The Brief
The Scottish Qualification Authority produce information about national qualifications and is used by teachers, students, school coordinators throughout Scotland. The SQA.org.uk website is a large site of around 11,000 pages. Users complained that searching for information was poor. Our brief was to find out why....

Methods
Our first step was to conduct an expert review of the search system to see if this yielded any important information. We were able to see straight away that there were serious usability problems with the interface and quality of results: multiple search boxes performed different search functions and result titles and descriptions were often incomplete.

Further research followed: a round of user testing and a thorough analysis of Google Analytics revealed that the biggest problems, aside from layout issues, was incomplete and inaccurate metadata and configuration settings in the Lucene search engine.

Results
We produced several reports which detailed what the major issues with the search interfaces were; a metadata schema for key content pages; a detailed list of recommendations to improve layouts; a list of configuration recommendations for the Lucene search engine

Why this should matter
Searching is a popular user behaviour. If your site search engine does not function as intended, users will not be able to get to the content they need and this could cost you money.