As a school research case on behalf of the Swedish company Arboair, me and a group of three UX Design students were asked to research the possibilities to improve the company’s homepage. 

We were given the task to research how Arboair could improve their homepage to communicate the value of their services within the forestry industry to possible customers and investors. Arboair was at this point not in contact with active users of their service which could have provided insights for our research project. What Arboair expressed was their main goal was to improve the page in terms of marketability, readability and usability. To get in touch with possible customers and understand what they need from the homepage we went on and joined online forums and discussion groups for people within the forestry business that may be able to provide us with further information. Apart from this we mailed several organizations that owned, administrated or worked with forest in any way. 

Our research process started out with an analysis of four different competitors to Arboair and how they designed and made use of their homepages in terms of marketability. The second phase was an heuristic evaluation where we dived into usability and readability. As a third qualitative method we interviewed people who owned forest and worked within the industry but who had no earlier knowledge of Arboair as a company. Within the process, while I was involved in the conduction of all methods, my main tasks were the manuscript of the interview, conduction of interviews and the competitive analysis. 

Research methods used:

Competitive analysis

Interviews

Heuristic evaluation

Through the triangulation of these three different methods we gathered a number of insights about target groups and their needs. Some of the more impactful insights were that the homepage contained a lot of long texts where confusing technical language was used, while selling points important to customers were not highlighted enough. The use of color, typography and white space could be improved to increase structure and sense for first time page visitors.

Apart from all the things I learned about the forestry business, as the main objective of this case was to get experience in UX research, one major learning from this project is the many benefits of having a proper research plan.