Picture taken by the Westport Community Theater (2023)

About the Theater

The Westport Community Theatre (WCT) is a community theater located in the Town Hall building of Westport, CT. They began as the Westport Players in 1956, performing in schools and other found spaces until they secured the location they now occupy on Myrtle Ave.

Like most community theaters, WCT relies on revenue from ticket sales, donations, and subscriptions/memberships to function. They are also reliant on community participation both on-stage and off-stage to continue their work.

Screenshot of the WCT homepage (as of March 3, 2025)

The Challenge

The Westport Community Theater website is minimal in design and function, but ultimately lacks organization, information hierarchy, and does not always follow industry convention. This decreases user-friendliness which can impact their business needs.

User personas taken from the report (linked below)

Act I: Research

Like most community theaters, WCT relies on revenue from ticket sales, donations, and subscriptions/memberships to function. They are also reliant on community participation both on-stage and off-stage to continue their work.Several research methods were used to collect data and gather information about the WCT website:

• Comparative Analysis
• User Personas (seen left)
• Interview Questions
• Survey Questions (click HERE to access the survey)
• Card Sorting
• Diary Study
• Heuristic Evaluation
• Usability Test
  

Act II: Discoveries

1. Overwhelming navigation pane. The navigation pane currently lists all pages on the website with no general categories, making it hard to find information easily.

2. Wordy pages. Many pages on the site lack consistent text hierarchy (i.e. headers, bold, etc.) which can make finding information difficult.

3. Info locations are disconnected from user expectations. Both the card sort and usability test revealed that users expect to find information in certain places, which causes them to flip back and forth through pages to find relevant information.

4. Confusing mailing list form. The mailing list form contains some odd sections, including a "Full Address" section that requires users to input their address for a second time. It also does not contain the option to "become a member", a feature that is described on the Membership Info page of the website.

Screenshot taken from the WCT website (as of March 7, 2025)

Act III: Solutions

1. Create industry-consistent categories to organize pages in navigation. This will decrease the time users spend looking for information and clean up the current navigation pane.

2. Add visual hierarchy to site pages with headers and sections. This will decrease the amount of time users spend reading information on the site.

3. Update website information to match industry conventions and user expectations. Simple changes like putting the theater location in the Contact page or creating a Subscription page will go a long way in making the website more standard and accessible to visitors.

4. Update the mailing list form. Removing sections and adding the ability to indicate interest in membership will eliminate user confusion and the form will match instructions given to site visitors.