Art on Sedgwick
My initial program of study for my Master of Arts was in New Media Studies before switching to Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse. During this time I took a course called Writing Digital Content. This course was structured around a service-learning project, in which groups of students were partnered with Non-Profit Organizations in order to help them develop a digital content strategy. My group was paired with a community art center called Art on Sedgwick. In addition to working with my peers in the class to analyze the organization’s web content, our group also met periodically with representatives of the organization to discuss our findings and their needs.
The group work for this project was built around three deliverables:
- a content critique of the organization’s online content (website, social media, etc.),
- an initial content strategy report focused on audience and message
- a final content strategy report focused on the creation and publishing of content.
Content Audit
Although the nature of the work was collaborative, there were portions of the project that I worked on individually which contributed to the group’s success. The first was a content audit of the website.
Tasks
- took an inventory of all of the content that the organization has online
- assessed its quality and relevance to the key message and audiences of the organization
- produced a spreadsheet which describes different content types, their strengths and weaknesses, and also what potential actions or strategies the organization might take to make improvements to the website.
Below I have included the spreadsheet workbook which includes a content key and my content audit of the website.
Usability Testing
The second individual contribution I made to the project was conducting usability testing.
Tasks
- selected representatives of the three key audiences our group identified
- developed a methodology to study their interactions with the organization’s website with three particular research questions in mind
- conducted testing using three methodological tasks
- preliminary questions, to determine demographic data and establish context
- a task analysis, in which I asked the user representatives to attempt tasks relevant to the audience’s needs while “thinking aloud” as they worked with the website
- a semantic differential survey, in which I gave the user representatives a pair of contrasting descriptions of the site and ask them to rate them on a type of a Likert scale (i.e., a five-point scale in which they can identify weakly or strongly with the given adjectives)
- wrote a usability testing report describing my research and offering recommendations based on the results
The final report on my usability testing is included below.
Content Strategy Reports
The two components of the project described above were vital contributions to the completion of my group’s content strategy report for Art on Sedgwick. Both of them helped identify situations where the organization’s web content was not meeting the expectations of the users or fulfilling the goals of the organization. This informed our suggestions on the creation, redesign and planning of the organization’s digital content.
For additional context, I am also including the initial and final content strategy report that my group created. Some of my individual contributions include the section on profiles and some of the website mockups.
Anthony Melville: Portfolio 