Within the past year the United States Fencing Association released a new version of their membership and tournament registration website. It was designed and created by Designsensory, a Knoxville based advertising agency. This website replaces the pretty much universally disliked Railstation. Railstation was confusing, slow and not to mention extremely ugly, so this is a welcome change.

However, this isn’t to say the new website is perfect. In order to get a sense of the flaws and benefits of the new site, I’m going to perform a usability test on the site. A usability test is when the creator of a website watches a user interact with, and complete certain tasks on a website. It’s a crucial part of any design process that allows designers to understand precisely how a user, well, uses a site.

Since I can’t have you sitting with me as I use the website, I’m going to walk you through a simulated usecase that may or may not happened to me a few days ago.

First, let’s get to the registration site. I’m looking to register for the January North American Cup. The registration deadline is ending soon, so I better do it soon! How about I go to the January NAC page?

Side note: Damn USFA, please use the sides of your site. Responsiveness is important!

Okay, well, um, I’m not really sure where to register. I see there’s a “Registration opens October 25, 2017”, but that’s not really helpful since it’s after October 25th. How about Quick Links? That looks like a good bet

Nope. Guess the paper entry form is more important than the registration website. After a little more searching I find a “Register Online” link in the dropdown menu

Way to make giving you money hard USFA

Okay, well that was a little weird. Let’s take a look at the site.

Not gonna lie, pretty slick

At first glance, things are looking pretty great. The sign in page has useful links, some pretty nice design and a fairly straightforward way of claiming your account (kudos to the developers for migrating the data, I would not want to mess with Railstation’s backend). But enough talking, let’s log in.

Huh, I don’t remember making a username. Maybe they mean email? Turns out they do. This isn’t a big deal, but username != email. Finally, we get to the membership page, which is truly a massive upgrade from the confusion of Railstation.

Honestly pretty well laid out

Huh, also weird. The two tournaments that they give me are the November NAC (this weekend as of this writing) and the December NAC (deadline closed). Odd… Why would I want to see NACs whose registration deadline has already elapsed? In fact if you click on these tournaments, there’s not a whole lot you can do on their pages

No results, nothing. Anyways, let’s move on. I see a link to a tournament browser, which brings me to this:

Another side note, but I’m always immediately suspicious of search bars. They never work properly

Again, they insist on showing tournaments with elapsed deadlines. In fact there’s only three tournaments on the whole first page for which you can actually register.

I decide to filter by Scope, which quickly narrows down the list

Neat! The November NAC starts tomorrow! I have no use for that information!

Awesome, finally found the January NAC. Just a quick recap, this took me 3 clicks and 3 different pages to find from the January NAC page on the main site. Not exactly straightforward. But how about we just put that aside and register! I click on the January NAC label and…nothing. Turns out that’s not a link