Introduction

I still can remember the panic and a hopeless feel when I received around $40000 medical bill. That moment I thought I could be responsible for it and I can’t afford my tuition here anymore. The truth is, I am not the only in this situation. There is news reported an international student refused the ambulance services when facing life-threating conditions. I build this website for the foreign students, especially for Chinese international students studying abroad in the United States.

The goal is to offer a simple and quick reference when they have to face the issue related to insurance; so that they could know more about insurance. The English version is a supplement page. For people who live in the United States, there are millions of websites talking about insurance terms: Medicare, hospital financial assistance, etc. For Chinese student, there is little.

For example, in English, the terms “copayment” and “coinsurance” are not too hard to distinguish. But in Mandarin, these two terms are confusing due to translation. The target audience of this website is the international student in 19 to 30 years old who speaks Chinese. Most of them are college students or graduated from college recently. They also hold non-immigrant status in the U.S.

In this paper, I will explain the methods of my usability test and findings. Following the conclusion. The paper will be broken into sections addressing all the problem I encountered and potential improvement of this website in the future.

Methods

Before asking the users to perform the test, I would let respondents go some free explore. I divided them into 2 groups: 2 people who are bilingual in English and Chinese. Another group would be all native American.

After they did some free surfing around my website, I asked the certain tasks includes:

1. Switching to English / Chinese Version
2. Finding the term of Copayment
3. Finding the amount of the deductible of UNL Insurance is.
4. Navigating to the page: Explanation of Benefit

The platforms used are half-half of MacOS and Windows. I told them to avoid using Safari because the website is not optimizing for Safari. The animation on Safari has a display problem. Due to the difficulty of addressing the WebKit optimization, I decided not to concern Safari adaptation in this project.

The browser used is Chrome. The testing computer does not all installed the latest version of Chrome. The oldest version in the testing process is Chrome 73. The latest version is Chrome 76. The version of browsers does not cause any problem in this testing.

Hardware the users used is either a MacBook or a PC laptop. The screen resolution of the PC is 1920*1080. The MacBook all has retina display which is hard to determine the actual resolution. The mockups of the project were designed based on the resolution of Sketch preset “Desktop HD” 1440*1024.

Findings

The findings will be broken into two sections, Chinese version and English version.

English version:

All users completed the task successfully. They performed each task quickly. It is enough to satisfy them. For the tasking that asking to find a term, one version was trying to find a search bar and search for the term. They confused when facing some typos and grammatic errors. Some places sound odd. Users pointed out my error and I fixed those error before final version submission.

Users described the website is useful but not instantly. They described this website could be a future reference and they would go back if they have any questions in the future. One user looked for the contact info. He felt odd when there is no “Contact Us” button on the website.

All users are highly satisfied when the addressing overall design. They described the design and transition between pages is very smooth. The whole website is easy to navigate.

Chinese Version:

Users completed the task successfully. They did not notice any typos and grammatic errors since Mandarin is my native language. Therefore, this version is easier for me. Unlike English users, they described the website is useful instantly. There are several insurance terms they didn’t know, and they learned it on my website.

Additionally, one comment was “the overall information is not enough, and the EOB page has the white space on the bottom.” Chinese website always seems has a higher intensity of information than the English website, which might be the reason why the user thinks the information intensity is not enough.

Conclusion

Things I did wrong (Cons):

1. No search bars. I assumed the website is not huge enough to have a search bar. Turns out the user stills try to use the search bar.
2. Failed to design mobile first. When I have to go back to design the mobile version, the degree of difficulty went higher.
3. The navigation bar was reversed. I changed to the order of left to right.
4. Typos are grammatic errors. There is no spelling check in Brackets. I should write things in Grammarly before putting into HTML.
5. I do not address the problem of the accessibility for the disabled. I hope I could have more time.

Things I did right (Pros):

1. Overall design theme, smooth animations, and JavaScript screen roll.
2. Great contents and source for Chinese international student living in the United States.
3. SEO and Analytics
4. The HTML and CSS were validated.

Overall, people gave my website the positive comments. There are a lot of problems I was trying to fix, but I was overwhelmed with the personal health issue and other class. In the future, I will rebuild this website and using mobile-first concept. I will make “insurance explained” video in the future. This website will be a reference for people who saw the video but still want to know more information. I believe now is the age of video, using video to promote a website might seem to go a wrong and reversed way. By using video to target millennials and Generation Z is a good way to bring traffic to my website.

Technical side, I will learn more knowledge about JavaScript, Bootstrap, and Vue.js. I hope my website could be a full-stack website. I purchased the Designcode.io subscription and I will keep learning.

I definitely spend a huge amount of time in this project, and I enjoy the satisfaction when people think this website is useful. I love front-end development. This project is the beacon that leads to my career path.