Overview
This project is a user-centered audit of the University of New Mexico’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) website. The audit evaluated the site across five heuristic dimensions: discoverability of services, navigation clarity, visual hierarchy, mobile accessibility, and content freshness. The deliverable — a professional PowerPoint presentation — was addressed to the CTL organization as a prospective client, including a prioritized action plan with high-, medium-, and low-priority recommendations grounded in usability theory and user observation.
Theoretical Framework and Methodology
The audit methodology drew on Nielsen’s (1994) ten heuristics as an evaluative lens, applying each principle to specific elements of the CTL website including the navigation menu, search functionality, homepage layout, and mobile rendering. The project also applied Rubin and Chisnell’s (2008) concept of formative evaluation — the goal was not to benchmark performance but to identify usability problems early and recommend actionable fixes before a formal redesign.
Visual and informational design problems were analyzed through the frameworks of Kimball and Hawkins (2007), who argue that document design must foreground user tasks rather than institutional structure. The CTL site was found to organize content according to departmental logic rather than user goals — a common but significant usability failure that makes it difficult for students to quickly identify and access the services they need.
Key Findings
The audit identified three high-priority issues: (1) the absence of a scoped site search, forcing users to rely on page-by-page browsing; (2) unclear information architecture with no breadcrumb navigation and inconsistent labeling across service categories; and (3) mobile accessibility failures including poor contrast ratios, small tap targets, and unstable responsive layouts on common screen sizes. Three medium-priority issues were also identified: dead space in the visual layout, a lack of last-updated dates contributing to uncertain content freshness, and the absence of role-based filtering.
Typical Users and Equity Dimensions
The typical CTL user population includes undergraduate students seeking tutoring and academic support, graduate students looking for writing and research assistance, instructors seeking professional development, and staff managing accessibility compliance. Crucially, a significant portion consists of first-generation college students, English language learners, and students with disabilities — groups whose access to institutional services is most severely affected by poor usability. The audit’s equity-focused recommendations were motivated by this reality: improving discoverability, contrast, and mobile responsiveness is a material access intervention, not merely a cosmetic upgrade.
Recommendations
High-priority recommendations included implementing a CTL-scoped search bar with service-category filters, revising the information architecture based on card-sorting feedback, adding breadcrumb navigation and persistent quick-links, and conducting a full mobile accessibility audit. Medium-priority recommendations addressed visual design and content freshness. A low-priority recommendation for an interactive “Resource Finder” tool by user role was also proposed as a future enhancement.
| SLOs Addressed: SLO 1 (Audience Assessment), SLO 3 (TPC History and Equity), SLO 4 (Communication Output), SLO 6 (Social Justice Design) |
Reflection
This project taught me that the audit process is fundamentally an act of translation: taking the lived experiences of users — their confusion, their wrong turns, their moments of giving up — and translating them into the language of design specifications that an organization can act upon. It also confirmed that user-centered design and social justice are not separate commitments but deeply intertwined ones. A site that is hard to navigate for a fluent English speaker with a high-speed connection is nearly inaccessible for a multilingual user on a mobile device with limited data. Designing for the most constrained user is always the right standard.