Testing Ease of Use with Limited Means: CDC Learning Connection Website Usability Evaluation

Background:

The CDC Learning Connection (CDC LC) connects public health professionals and healthcare workers to quality public health trainings from CDC, other federal agencies, and federally funded partners. Each month, CDC LC promotes courses through the CDC LC website (https://www.cdc.gov/learning), e-newsletter, social media, and key training partners.

Program background:

Website usability evaluations explore the user experience, by assessing elements like how well users can use a website to achieve their goals and users’ overall website satisfaction. In September 2018, we began the first-ever usability evaluation of the CDC LC website since its launch in 2010. The evaluation goal was to identify opportunities for optimizing the user experience, which will help advance CDC’s efforts to connect the public health and healthcare workforce to quality trainings so they are better prepared to meet demands of their job. Given organizational constraints, we needed to complete the evaluation with limited staff and financial resources.

Evaluation Methods and Results:

Before the evaluation, we conducted several activities to gather information on CDC LC users and potential usability concerns. Activities included a survey of the e-newsletter audience, a search engine optimization audit, and key informant interviews with six CDC stakeholders. We used results of these activities along with best practices in usability testing to design our evaluation, which sought to address four questions: How do users navigate and understand the CDC LC website?; What pain points do users experience as they travel between the CDC LC website, featured trainings, and related websites?; What are additional functionalities or information on the CDC LC website that would be helpful to users?; and What factors influence users’ selection of professional training? We recruited eight public health and healthcare professionals who represented CDC LC website users to participate in usability testing. We conducted testing through semistructured, 1-to-1 sessions using Adobe Connect. Open-ended questions explored participants’ preferences regarding professional training and their impressions of the CDC LC website. Task-based questions explored participants’ ability to complete specific website tasks, such as signing up for the e-newsletter and locating previously featured trainings. Currently, we are performing a thematic analysis of open-ended question responses and a quantitative analysis of task performance (e.g., percentage of participants who completed a task successfully and average time to task completion).

Conclusions:

We anticipate evaluation results will generate actionable recommendations to improve the CDC LC website. We will present our creative approach for conducting a usability evaluation with limited resources, and how we used results to guide and implement website improvements. We will also share findings on factors that broadly guide participants’ selection of training.

Implications for research and/or practice:

This project provides a comprehensive structure and process for usability evaluations of professional websites in resource-limited settings. Findings on factors that influence participants’ selection of training will also help communicators reach professional audiences with targeted educational content.