The Website and the User
The Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) website (https://www.ksdot.org/index.asp ) is the one I chose. My tester is an expert user of the internet. She is in her early 40’s. She is pretty good at online shopping, she uses social media a lot, she is good at navigating the internet, and she can do research on the net. She has been to this website a couple of times but has never checked out the RWIS page.
A User’s Actions
The task was to check the status of the weather station in Chanute, KS. In order to get this information, she has to get to the road weather information system (RWIS) webpage from the KDOT home page and locate Chanute, KS. The first thing she did was search for “RWIS” (road weather information system) (she is familiar with the term) on the search bar of the home page of the KDOT site. It returned 10,022 results, and for me, the only relevant page was the top one: KDOT: RWIS. She clicked on it, and it took her to the old RWIS webpage, where everything looked legit. But it was not interactive, some of the RWIS sites on that page were not existent, and the information on that page was not up-to-date. Basically, she was on the wrong webpage. Then she went back to the home page and started exploring the site. She clicked on some links, but none of them took her to the RWIS site. Eventually, she was able to put two and two together. She found the link she was looking for in the “Travel Information” tab and chose “Road Weather Stations.” She is familiar with the map of the state of Kansas, so, when she got to the RWIS site, she was able to find Chanute quickly.
Problems Encountered
The thing that she did that I found unexpected was when she started with a search, instead of exploring the site first. The problem that she encountered was not becoming familiar with the site. I would have explored the site before jumping to do a search. To make it worse, the search capability of the KDOT website is not the best either. Another issue is the “KDOT: RWIS” link (https://www.ksdot.org/burcompser/generatedreports/weather.asp ), which took her to an old webpage of the RWIS stations. KDOT should have removed that site because the site has irrelevant information and it would be dangerous for people travelling and referring to that site for updated weather conditions. Take, for example, the Oakley site. How do you get a 159 mi/h wind gust?
As a novice to the site, she did know the location of the RWIS page link. The site is confusing, and there are links everywhere. Links to news, links to reporting, links to the other areas of KDOT, links to their social media, and links to getting around the state. All the links are a distraction, because the real information was on the tabs at the top of the page. She mentioned that she did not focus on any of those because they were confusing, and she was expecting a link to the RWIS sites on the page. The last issue that I found was that the RWIS site (https://rwis.ksdot.gov/ ) is not user-friendly at all. The stations on the map are not labelled properly, and the lists of the stations and their status are not arranged alphabetically but rather based on the state’s districts, and there is no way of manipulating the arrangements. For somebody who is not familiar with the map of Kansas, they will have a hard time figuring out which is Chanute, and it will be hard for users to figure out where to find Chanute on the list.
Suggestions
Since weather conditions are very important to the people of Kansas and the people traveling through it, the main page needs to have a direct link to the RWIS site’s page, not under some tabs, which are hard to find. As for the RWIS webpage, it needs to have a clear label for the stations on the map and a better arrangement of the lists of stations that can be manipulated by the user on how he/she wants to view them. It would also be nice if the items on the list would link to the location of the map or vice versa, and lastly, people have no need for the site ID. How about removing that tab and replacing it with the names of the sites?