# Presentation: 408866

## Usability Testing ofRMA’s Website

**What We’ve Learned So Far**

**Janet Stevens***RMA Website Project Manager*
- Janet_Stevens@wdc.usda.gov202-690-3040

## What Is Usability?

- The measure of the quality of a user's experience when interacting with a product or system, such as a web site, a software application, mobile technology, or any user-operated device.

## Why Usability Testing?

- Research by User Interface Engineering, Inc., shows that people cannot find the information they seek on Web sites about 60% of the time.
- Industry expert Jakob Nielsen measured traffic at 42 major sites where usability had been emphasized at the design stage and found that they performed 135 percent better on average.
- Industry content expert Gerry McGovern  stated that 90% of users went to only 1% of the Microsoft site

## Why Now?

- Site statistics showed that the rapid annual growth following our first website redesign in October 1999 had slowed, from a rate of 46% for hits and 43% for visitors from 2000-01 to 16% for hits and 15% for visitors from 2001-02.
- Although staying at near-record levels of 3.4 million hits and nearly 80,000 visitors per month, site usage had slowed. We decided to transition the site to a portal to accommodate our diverse audiences.
- To transition to a portal in the next 12-18 months under the eGov initiative, we would need audience analysis and usability/accessibility testing.

## Why Contract Out?

- Complying with Section 508 accessibility requirements for the web site would use up existing web team resources
- No resources to help developers ensure Section 508 compliance of existing online applications
- No team experience with/education on web usability testing
- No current data available on our audiences; only anecdotal or feedback-related info

## Our Goals

- Learn about our 3 major audiences:
**Producers**, especially limited-resource, minority, and specialty crop
**Commodity insurance agents** who sell to and manage policies/claims for producers
**RMA and FSA employees**, especially in the field offices, who producers rely on extensively for program information and education

## Our Goals

- Have an independent review of the accessibility/usability of our online applications
- Have the user interface of our top two online applications completely redesigned
- Get usability/accessibility training and documentation for the web team and developers

## What We Learned About Our Core Audiences

**Producers:**
- Do not regularly go to Web sites to get information; however, some want to  conduct business with the government online in the future
- Who use the Internet tend to be younger, more technology savvy, more highly educated, and operators of larger farms
- In many operations task a spouse or child to gather relevant ag information and news for the enterprise
- Look for specific information: a quotation, a premium estimate, or a county production average

## What We Learned About Our Core Audiences

**Producers:**
- Connect at lower bandwidths, do not scroll, and are very impatient with slow downloads on modems
- Want to see lessons learned and best practices
- Are very interested in seeing what other producers are doing, whether in commodity insurance, planting techniques, or farm management case studies
- Like finding hints, tips, and suggestions for improving their practice
- Want to use the Internet in the future for online trainings, rather than attending local events

## What We Learned About Our Core Audiences

**Commodity Insurance Agents:**
- Connect frequently at higher bandwidths
- Tend to have our site as their home page
- Are familiar with agency/insurance terms, but there were some terms used that even they did not know
- Monitor our site for the latest agency news
- Use our daily ag weather information, but rely on producers and local contacts for local weather news

## What We Learned About Our Core Audiences

**Commodity Insurance Agents**
- Visit Tools and Calculators extensively and most used either the Summary of Business or the Premium Calculator every week or several times a week
- Tended to use the proprietary version provided by the insurance company, not the RMA online version

## What We Learned About Our Core Audiences

**RMA/FSA Employees**
- Use the information on our intranet unless they can only find it on the public site
- Look at information on a larger scale, such as yearly trends, overall participation rates, or acres enrolled
- Have direct contact with producers and are often help them use the site
- Need to find a specific answer to a query in a short period of time. They feel confident that the answer is “somewhere” in a known area of the site, but they can’t always find it quickly and have learned who to ask in the office who can point them in the right direction

## Putting It All Together

- We need to make our applications and front door more usable for our audiences by:
- Improving the terms and organization of our nav bar
- Segregate information based on audience type; often their needs are too diverse
- Improve our online glossary
- Add producer case studies to teach others about best practices