InformalScience.org User Study

InformalScience.org is an online collection of resources designed to serve a broad community of professionals whose work relates to informal education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), InformalScience hosts a variety of usercontributed resources, including a wiki of evidence-based information on the impacts of informal STEM and a database of over 7,000 reports, articles, project descriptions, and other items uploaded by CAISE and website members.

The 2016 user study was undertaken as part of an ongoing effort to better serve the website’s visitors. Following a redesign of the site in January of 2016, the CAISE team wanted to ensure that the site was user-friendly and contained content of value to its users. Rockman et al was hired to conduct the study, focusing on the following questions:
⋅ What types of users frequent the website? What are their goals, motivations, and needs?
⋅ Is the purpose of the website clear to users?
⋅ Is the website organized in a way that is intuitive to visitors? Can users easily navigate to the material that interests them?
⋅ Do website users find the content on InformalScience useful and relevant to their work?
⋅ What changes in site organization or content would improve the utility of the site for users?