Best of Baskin Presented by Avram Baskin

Spock says… “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”

Requirements Gathering

Focus Groups

Protocols What do members expect to see on the web site Three target groups New members Veteran members Committee, chapter, and trip leaders 10 participants in each group

Major Issues All participants joined to go on trips, and all participants found it difficult to get the information they needed to go on a trip If members do not quickly find information they want they get frustrated and give up and do not try again Participants felt that they were just “thrown into their membership” – no orientation is provided

Recommendations Provide a home page link to trip listings Make trips sortable by date, activity, and type of activity Include printable copy of trip listings Explain the geography of the club and how the Boston Chapter is organized

Comparative Home Pages

Methodology 30 homes pages from sites for organizations similar to the AMC Six screen shots per sheet of poster board Participants ranked their top five choices, based on immediate visual appeal Lindgaard, Fernandes, Dudek and Brown (2006) Screen shot resolution was 800 x participants

Five Highest Ranked Sites Randolph Mountain Club 26 Votes American Canoe Association 26 Votes

Five Highest Ranked Sites Appalachian Trail Conservancy 16 Votes Nature Conservancy 21 Votes

Five Highest Ranked Sites Trustees of the Reservations 16 Votes

Five Lowest Ranked Sites Outdoors Club 1 Vote League of American Bicyclists 0 Votes

Five Lowest Ranked Sites Save the Harbor, Save the Bay 2 Votes American Whitewater 1 Vote

Five Lowest Ranked Sites AMC Southeast Mass. Chapter 2 Votes

Next Steps Apply metrics developed by Ivory and colleagues for predicting if a web site will be highly rated Perform a cluster analysis to assess similarities between the groups of ranked sites submitted by the participants

Site Visits & Contextual Inquiry

LL Bean Corporate Profile $1.5 billion annual sales 21.5% annual sales growth 3,900+ employees 2.6% annual employee growth 200 million+ catalogs distributed per year 10 specialty catalogs

About the Call Center Number of Representatives (Agents) Peak…………………………………………3,000 Off Peak……………………………………1,500 Number of Inbound Calls/Day Slow Periods (April & May)………..50,000 Peak Mondays………………………..180,000 No Outbound Calls Except in Response to Service Issues

Strategic Objective Customer should speak with a human being as quickly as possible No complex phone trees If wait is four minutes or less, customer is put on hold If wait greater than four minutes, customer gets a busy signal Don’t tie up resources for more than four minutes

Avaya Product History Using CMS for almost ten years Export CMS historical data for use in "home grown" historical reports They use CMS real time reports to analyze call volumes and assess resource requirements "CMS is a workhorse" Sue Beckleman, IT Managerc

Work Force Planning Analyst Responsible for staffing and scheduling in real time Analyze all call, , chat, and mail order activity Make sure work is evenly allocated to agents. If high call volumes in certain areas, reassign agents to those areas

Work Force Planning Analyst Workspace

User Questionnaires

Issues May be difficult to provide statistical accuracy i.e. reporting at 95% confidence level with a margin of error of ± 3% Limited resources Possibility of bad data in contact list All members did not have equal opportunity to respond to questionnaire But results still useful Data for user profiles Data for modeling user expectations for the web site

Results

Activity#% Hiking Bicycling Skiing Kayaking267.3 Backpacking257.1 Canoeing174.8 Snow Shoeing174.8 Camping164.5 Other Activities133.7 Local Walks102.8 Climbing: Rock/Ice/Mountain82.3 Sea Kayaking30.8 Conservation/Nature Events20.6 Wind Surfing20.6 Family Outings10.3

Results EIVIINUVUEU EI VI I N U VU EU Conservation/Environmental Initiatives Recreational Activities EI:Extremely Important VI:Very Important I:Important N:Neither Important or Unimportant U:Unimportant VU:Very Unimportant EU:Extremely Unimportant

Usability Testing

Methodology Comparison of current site with two other sites AMC: Berkshire: The same tasks on all three sites Quantifiable measure of performance Six participants

Accessibility The user attempts to resize the text using CTRL+ and nothing happens. “That’s a disadvantage to people my age”.

Search Control The user wants to search for a trip, but finds the search form to be to complex – “I’m a Google fan”.

Recommendations Size all screen elements using “ems” to allow resizing of text Provide two levels of search Simple search Advanced search

Information Architecture

Process Flows

Wireframes