| Links: A Brief User Test: Aer Lingus and Ryanair
The following article presents a brief look at how a user test is designed, conducted and reported. All these tests took part in our usability lab and provide an insight into the dramatic
results that can be revealed by a testing programme. The aim of this test was to evaluate the new Aer Lingus online booking facility
(www.aerlingus.com), comparing it with the same facility which is provided by their direct competitor Ryanair (www.ryanair.com). We asked four typical users to buy return tickets to the
UK or Europe using both sites.
Our findings reveal a number of design problems with the Aer Lingus site that result in a negative user experience, and increase the time it takes to purchase a ticket. This report details
the major areas of difficulty, making comparisons with users' experiences on the Ryanair site. [frontend.com] PDF-file 98Kb
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us A Heuristic Evaluation of a World Wide Web Prototype
The evaluation was carried out by two experimenters. In order to prepare for the evaluation session, the experimenters prepared two documents. The first was a project overview, describing the objectives, target audiences, and expected usage patterns of a WWW public access system. The second was a list of usability principles, or heuristics. The heuristics were derived from a general-purpose list given by Nielsen, supplemented by hypertext-specific principles drawn from Shneiderman and Kearsley [2] and the experimenters' intuition. It is important to note that the prototype developers had not been given either of these documents during their development process; the documents were drawn up after the fact.
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us A Report on the UK’s Top 100 Companies’ Corporate Home Pages
This report by Porter Research was commissioned by Interactive Bureau, Britain’s leading bespoke Web design
agency and consultancy. Its aim is to assess the Home pages of the corporate Web sites of the top 100 companies on the London Stock Exchange. In simple terms what we were seeking in these corporate Home pages was for them to contain ten standard
elements, to work for everyone who might want to visit them, not to load too slowly, to point potentially
important visitors in the right direction and for the whole process to be simple and user-friendly.
However, what appears evident is that very few companies have got these things right, and/or there are few
Web design companies out there capable of delivering these simple objectives.
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Comparative Evaluation of Usability Tests
Seven professional usability labs and one university student team have carried out independent, parallel usability tests of the same state-of-the-art, live, commercial web site. The web site used for the usability tests is www.hotmail.com, a major provider of free web-based e-mail. The panel will discuss similarities and differences in process, results and reporting.
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Evaluating the World Wide Web: A Global Study of Commercial Sites
While commercial applications of the Internet proliferate, particularly in the form of business sites on the World Wide Web, on-line business is still relatively insignificant. One reason is that truly compelling applications have yet to be devised to penetrate the mass market. To help identify approaches that may eventually be successful, one must address the question of what value is being created on the Web. As a first step, this paper proposes a framework to evaluate Web sites from a customer's perspective of value-added. A global study covering 1,800 sites, with representative samples from diverse industries and localities worldwide, is conducted to give a profile of commercial use of the World Wide Web in 1996.
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Evaluation of the SiteBrain Navigational Tool
This study examines the usability and information visualization of the SiteBrain navigation tool. This tool enables web site navigation through a multitree hierarchical structure, displaying grandparent, parent, child, and sibling nodes. Usability testing was used to compare the strengths and weaknesses of the SiteBrain navigation tool to traditional pagebased
navigation. Several limitations of the tool were found, including loose coupling of the content with the SiteBrain nodes, visual separation of the content with the tool, and a limited
sense of context. Recommendations for improvement of the SiteBrain are offered, including merging the SiteBrain and content windows, notifying users of content loading, and tightly coupling the content selection with the SiteBrain display. [Michael Elledge and Kristen Truong, University of Michigan, School of Information] PDF-file
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Evaluation of User Interfaces of Swedish Newspapers on Internet
This paper presents a usability evaluation of three Swedish newspapers published on the Internet. The method of evaluation is Jacob Nielsen’s "Heuristic evaluation". All of the evaluated sites had major usability problems that ought to be corrected. This paper lists the problems encountered and proposes changes to the designs.
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us garden.com Usability Study
The main goal of this study was to identify usability problems with the garden.com
shopping experience re-design to date. In the first study we conducted for garden.com,1 a number of impediments to usability were identified via a comprehensive usability test of the shopping experience then available through the site. Human Code has sought to rectify
many of these impediments in their redesign of the garden.com shopping experience.
While this redesign is not yet complete, several main architectural constructs have been defined and were examined in the current study. [PDF-file 58,6kB]
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Heuristic evaluation of the Hotmail e-mail application
To clarify the guidelines suggested in “Guidelines for Web Applications” this document documents a heuristic evaluation of an existing web application and suggest a redesign of
it. The chosen application is Hotmail, an e-mail application to read, write and organize e-mails. Not all of the functionality it offers will be covered, though. The first section of this document will introduce the application. Then, three sections with the actual evaluation follow. The problems encountered are grouped into the areas
application structure and movement, action invocation and page design as in the
guidelines. [Andreas Ehrencrona 1998]
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Kypros-net Project Learn Greek! Usability Analysis
The overall project goal was to conduct a thorough usability analysis of the
Kypros-Net Greek language course and make recommendations to improve
its usability. Analysis was based on information from a variety of sources, including: current and past users, content providers, U-M Language Resource Center (LRC) administrators, research on web-based and selftaught language programs, and usability tests on prospective users. The following report provides an in-depth analysis of the above issues and our recommendations. [Prof. Judy Olson, University of Michigan, School of Information] PDF-file
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Making Joining Easy: Case of an Entertainment Club Website
The goal of this project was to design a site that would
make the online process of joining the Columbia House
Music or DVD club faster and easier. Faced with low
conversion rates from online advertising, our challenge
was to quickly solve the main problems with the
existing join process, which were identified through
user testing and site data logs. The project was extremely successful. Conversion rates
increased 180%. The design work for this project then
set direction for subsequent visual and interface design
projects for Columbiahouse.com. [AIGA 2002]
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Modalis Market Tracks
The study examined sites by evaluating the user’s experience according to seven recognized industry standards (usability components): intuitive navigation, functional design, efficiency in dealing with different levels of user expertise, minimalist design, robust error management, help and documentation functions, and accurate system feedback to the visitor. Each site’s technical performance was also evaluated using measurements of download times, browser compatibility, number of broken links, and number of HTML errors.
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Readability Of Websites
The effects of 6 foreground/background color combinations (color), 3 font types (Arial, Courier New, & Times New Roman), and 2 word styles (Italicized & Plain) on readability of websites were investigated. In general the results suggest that there is no one foreground/background combination, font, or word style which leads to the fastest RT (i.e. best readability), but rather a designer must consider how each variable affects the other(s).
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Shopping on the Internet: Usability of 9 Swiss E-Commerce Sites
The succes of e-commerce is not so obvious; it depends on the usability of the sellers' web sites; and, according to our study, 61% of users did not manage to order a train ticket on the SBB site within 15 minutes; the consequense of this difficulty is that 46% of them did not want to reuse the site. Other figures in the report obtained similar results.
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Usability research report on a badly designed web-based data dictionary.
PDF-file [STC Annual conference, 2000]
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Usability of "Good Documents"
Overzicht en rapportage van een web usability onderzoek voor de site gooddocuments.com. [1998]
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Usability Studies And Designing Navigational Aids For The World Wide Web
Web designers are constantly searching for ways to improve their works. Recently published books provide such recommendations, but their quality varies greatly. This paper describes how usability testing was used to validate design recommendations. The results show a need for navigational aids that are related to the particular Web site and located beneath the Browser buttons. Furthermore, usability criteria were established that limit page changes to 4 and search times to 60 seconds for information retrieval.
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This report documents the findings of a usability test of the website www.TowerRecords.com carried out in
May 2001 by DialogDesign. The main purpose of the test was to assess the usability of the current website for
Northern European users. [DialogDesign 08/2001] PDF-file
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Schrijf een recensie | Voeg to aan del.icio.us Usability Testing for Intranets: A Case Study of the Bose Corporate Intranet
Een presentatie en testmateriaal over een usability test uitgevoerd op het intranet van Bose.
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