Designing a website

Executive summary

The purpose of this redesign is to improve the initial design after running it through tests. The importance of the test was to discover areas of weaknesses, areas that had to be scrapped off and those that had to be added. It was a mere test to find out how the users would find the system’s navigation and to improve its organization (Warall&Siarto, 2009).

The website is supposed to be user-friendly. Users are meant to acquire the information they seek to get with ease in the shortest time possible. The users who had been chosen during these experiments provided good recommendations on the weaknesses of the systems and other sectors that needed redesigning.

Introduction

This is a site where people go find out about movies and series. It should be able to provide information to the users about the movies without any difficulties. The redesign goals include making the website more organized so that users can quickly locate what they are seeking, reducing the contents in the site so that users can have an easy time using it, and include tables and boxes to help in the organization of the information provided. With these redesigns in place, the users will have an easy time finding their information(Warall&Siarto, 2009).

Evaluators recruited

Three evaluators were recruited:

User 1: 33 year old male, married with three kids. He works full time and studies part time in community college. He is not a movie fan.

User 2: a 25 year old who is addicted to movies.

User 3: is wife having two boys. She is a graduate of UMBC with MA.

Problems encountered by evaluators

The site contains a lot of information right from the main page

There are boxes that users can reach for when researching

The navigation menu on the left is very small and practically unnoticeable

The primary index page of the website has poor picture loading speed

Organization of the information on the home page and priority allocation

Severe problem encountered by evaluators

The site contains a lot of information right from the main page and no boxes to help the user navigate swiftly

Possible solutions for the problems

The exhibits of the website should be improved vastly. The photo viewer delaying the photo loading should be moved to galleries and help congesting the main index.

The main page of the website should contain almost tables and boxes. The purpose of that is to allow a more interactive navigation system that will integrate a more ‘artistic’ sparkle. The redesign of the primary page should look like the other pages in terms of style and theme.

Incorporating main menu with better and bolder navigation will improve the user friendliness. The home page navigation should be minimized and a down-list menu should be incorporated.

This process is vital because it gives a reflection of the reaction of the people. The sampled individuals provided important information about the weaknesses of the site and pin-pointed the areas that need reconstruction. The process improves any site or system by eliminating small errors by correcting and running tests on it, again and again(Warall&Siarto, 2009).

Think aloud tables

Participants for the evaluation

User 1: 33 year old male, married with three kids. He works full time and studies part time in community college. He is not a movie fan.

User 2: a 25 year old who is addicted to movies.

User 3: is wife having two boys. She is a graduate of UMBC with MA.

Tasks the users performed

The users browsed the home page with the purpose of finding something interesting.

The user clicked on the menu list on the home page

The user browsed the home page and waited for home page picture to load

Reasons for focusing on these tasks

The navigation task is the most important part of the website. Without proper navigation during website browsing, information location will be stressful and thus demoralize the user from pursuing further use.

The down menu task is vital because it provides the user with options on what he or she wants to have done

Since the final think aloud was conducted, the site has improved tremendously. The corrections about the home page, the photo viewer, the navigation, and the down menu list have been carried out. The site is now more user friendly and information access is very fast(Warall&Siarto, 2009).

Reflection and recommendations

The exercise of putting the website on test after making implementation has boosted the website navigations system and information organization. The people chosen throughout the website’s experiment posed as a great deal of help and their opinions were deeply considered.

The website needs to go through other scrutinizing processes that would include the indulgence of experts, other web designers and a huge number of test users. With this type of exposure, the common and obvious mistakes will be eliminated and ideas from other web designers and experts will be incorporated.

Reference

Watrall, E., &Siarto, J. (2009). Head first Web design. Beijing: O’Reilly.