Question#01
Good Interface Design:
Facebook.com
Purpose & Intended Users:
Facebook is the definitive social media website that barely needs any introduction. Its Interface was made as easy as anyone could use it.
Everyone, each human being on earth can use Facebook as human being is a social animal. It needs interaction. Facebook is a great source of social media
Good Points:
v Clear & Concise Sign-up Page:
A concise sign up page makes it easier for people to join Facebook. This interface design makes its quick and simple for users to sign up by requesting only vital registration info. Other personal info are filled in gradually after the users have joined and began the experience.
v Personalization Options
Facebook also allows users to customize pages and manage aspects of their accounts. The flexibility invites greater investment from the users and provides a more engaging Facebook experience.
v Tabbed Chat
Having tabbed chats gives users stronger sense of control and organization over their chatting activities. This design also allows the users to multitask and use other Facebook features while chatting.
Modal Windows with Darkened Background
When a picture is selected, a modal window is opened with a dark background. By blocking out the content in the background, the interface shifts the focus to the picture,
Bad Points:
v Auto-Play videos:
Auto play feature of the videos in Facebook is very annoying. It diverts user mind.
v Others message folder:
Others message folder contains useless messages and anyone on Facebook can send it.
v News feeds and recent activities:
Recent activity folders and games requests by friends are annoying. APP monetization is irritating. But they can be stop.
Usability Features:
- Learnability:
For a user, using Facebook first time, Facebook provides additional notes and help to the user at each stage to begin with a good start. This is a great learnability feature of Facebook.com, a standard and well off website should have.
Good usability is not attained overnight.
It requires thorough user research and an iterative approach of constant testing and refining.
Good usability depends on whether your website is available, clear, credible, learnable, and relevant to the people who actually use it.
- Visibility:
Visibility of Status Updates and Comments
Whenever users post updates or comments, the Facebook feed is instantly updated. Seeing the updated post feels like the natural result of typing. The responsiveness of the interface encourages interaction among friends and provides a better user experience.
Furthermore, there is a button for Share, comment, like. These buttons are visible each time user wants to perform such actions.
- Efficiency:
Facebook is such an efficient design as it provides the functionality user wants. It is an interacting website, which interacts very well within country and abroad.
This is also a platform which can be used between different organizations and business like online boutiques and shopping and also for educational purposes.
- Errors:
Facebook is less likely to have errors. These errors are most like server errors saying “Something went wrong” and is resolved as easy as possible.
The most common guideline violation is when an error message simply says something is wrong, without explaining why and how the user can fix the problem. Such messages leave users stranded.
Conclusion:
Facebook.com on the whole is a good interface that lets a very user friendly environment.
Bad Interface Design:
SIPhawaii.com
Purpose & Intended Users:
SIPhawaii.com is an e-commerce website that sells and ships Hawaiian products to a few countries.
Business men, companies, different organization and even an individual are its intended users.
However, its interface design probably does more harm than help.
Bad Points:
v Cluttered Design
That is the homepage of SIPhawaii.com. It is overloaded with too many product pictures and descriptions. Although there is a semblance of order upon inspection, the interface design is hardly intuitive for users to navigate.
A possible improvement will be to organize the products into different tabs (ex.: Coffee, Tea, Island Food) with a menu to navigate between them. With less visual overload and more space, the page will look more comprehensible and allow more emphasis on essential details.
v Too Wordy
The 4 page shipping details are found on the bottom half of the homepage, right below the display of all products. It is rather tedious and frustrating for users to read through the entire chunk of text to find the information they are looking for.
We would suggest that the shipping details to be summarized with the important info such as postage details presented in a concise table. Also, the unnecessary details should be dropped so that the users can find what they want without fuss. This would shorten the unwieldy length of the page.
v Too Many Pictures
If a picture paints a thousand words, then there are way too many words in the page shown above. This interface design distracts the users. Furthermore, while the order can be made at the bottom of that page, clicking on any picture brings the user to another page with the same order form. The design feels confusing and redundant.
We think that a better way of organizing the page would to be provide drop down menu for the users to choose the product. By separating the products into individual pages, there will be less distraction, clearer direction and significantly faster loading time for the users.
Good Points:
v Details
Too much detail for each item is present for customer satisfaction. For a serious candidate who want to shop will definitely require this much explanation because he needs to pay for that.
v More Details
Each product’s price is given and button with details behind it is a good approach for those who needs detail.
v Color Scheme
Color scheme is light and sweet, anyone can easily get the points.
v Login & Contact Information
There is a separate login and contact button at the top of the website which is visible to the customer for direct access.
Usability Features:
- Visibility:
This website have limited buttons for different types of products. As mentioned earlier there should be a separate portion for each type of product. Too much of pictures for each product and each different, seems tedious.
Yet there are many other buttons like contact, shopping cart etc.
- Learnability:
This website contains excess of information and details with so many pictures of products which makes it less learnable because at the end it have user agreement and detailed documents comprising of 4 pages for purchasing product, this is difficult to read and follow for the user using it first time. This decreases the usability of this website.
- Efficiency:
Efficiency is the term which should comply on user satisfaction about which the system is designed for. It is sometimes difficult for the user to find the product of his need and may result in poor efficiency of the website because user is always right (HCI terms). Things should be arranged in a sequence that should be easy finding and my fulfill user needs.
- Errors:
As an example, I was trying to order a custom-tailored shirt was highly confused when the first screen in Hamilton Shirts' "Create Your Shirt" process displayed a fully designed shirt with an "Add to Bag" button. This screen mixed two metaphors: a configurator and an e-commerce product screen.
This is a case where a default value isn't helpful: people who want to design their own shirt are unlikely to want to buy a pre-designed shirt on the first screen.
(This screen also suffers from Mistake #1: non-standard GUI controls. In addition to its non-standard drop-down selection menus in a tabbed dialog that doesn't look enough tabs on the screen has a non-standard way of paging through additional fabric swatches. Users are less likely to understand how to select fabrics when the controls are presented in this manner.)
Our test user never understood the process of designing his own shirt on this site and ultimately took his business elsewhere.
As another example, we once tested an e-commerce site that smacked users with a demand for their ZIP code before they could view product pages. This was a big turn-off and many users left the site due to privacy concerns. People hate snoopy sites. An alternative design worked much better: It explained that the site needed to know the user's location so it could state shipping charges for the very heavy products in question.
Conclusion: Experience makes or breaks websites
For great user experience, accessibility and clarity are essential. This can be achieved by simple and organized interface design and responsiveness as Facebook has shown us.
On the other hand, SIPhawaii.com’s excessive and redundant content and lack of organization results in a frustrating and confusing experience for the users. In our opinion, that is a bad interface design that leaves much to be desired.
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Question#2
Case study#01:
Scenario No#1: For original phone
Flaws:
- In that mobile the absence Of Phone Address Book.
- Secondly the functionality of buttons “YES” and “NO” isn’t properly understandable by user.
- And the interface isn’t attractive.
Solution:
- There should be proper phone Address Book for saving contacts.
- Instead of “yes” and “No” button there should be a “green” button for “call receive/dial” and “red” for “shutdown/disconnect”.
- There should be properly design the interface that the screen should be little bit wider and button should be of proper size.
Scenario No#02: For original phone
Flaws:
- Wastage of time for directory enquiries.
- Bad interface designing.
- The functionality of buttons “YES” and “NO” isn’t properly understandable by user.
Solution:
- There must be proper phone Address Book directory for saving the contacts.
- Instead of “yes” and “No” button there should be a “green” button for “call receive/dial” and “red” for “shutdown/disconnect”.
- There should be properly design the interface that the screen should be little bit wider and button should be of proper size.
Scenario No#03: for new phone
Flaws:
- Bad interface.
- To press button “yes” again and again is too irritating.
- User wouldn’t know the meaning of “pos?”
- There is lot of instructions for making call.
Solution:
- The interface should be design properly that screen should be little wider and the arrangements of calling buttons should be properly.
- Instead of “yes” and “No” button there should be a “green” button for “call receive/dail” and “red” for “shutdown/disconnect”.
- Instead of using “pos?” there should be proper message display like searching contact?
- There should be a buttons for direct access to contacts and messages. The user should select the contact from there and press the green button for call.
Scenario No#04: For new Phone
Flaws:
- Bad interface
- For saving a number lot of steps perform and lot of use of navigation keys.
- And for each step there is a conformation message and u have to press again and again “yes” button.
- User wouldn’t know the meaning of “pos?” and “number.”
- After storing number phone display “again store” and “Phone Book” without user desire.
Solution:
- The interface should be design properly that screen should be little wider and the arrangements of calling buttons and navigation keys should be properly.
- Instead of “yes” and “No” button there should be a “green” button for “call receive/dail” and “red” for “shutdown/disconnect”.
- Instead of performing lot of steps to go to phone directory and saving the number, the user should dial the number he wants to save and then press the button for saving i.e that I’m going to show in my interface.
- Instead of using “pos?” there should be proper message display like “searching”?
- And instead of “Number” there should be display message like “enter/save number?
- After saving the number the user should automatically return to main screen.
Case study#02:
Improvements:
- When she presses the main reactor control panel, there should be a warning displayed “Are you Sure?”, so that there may be a check before red state blow.
- There should be a back navigation within few seconds, so that if the user confirmed warning by mistake, there should be a risk factor involvement.
- Manual Override panel and Emergency Alarm panel should be placed near each other to avoid mismanagement.
- “SET” button does not perform efficiently. It should be efficient to use & there should be a reset value button to clear the cache.
- In Manual Override panel instead of drop down list, there should be buttons, whatever button user pushes target value for that value gets ready to be set in panel.
- After setting values of target attribute in using Numeric Keypad SET button in Manual Override panel should glow green so that user remember to press it after changing values (just like jenny did at first).
- In case of “core meltdown” situation, there should be automatic immediate shutdown commence should be triggered when there are only 5 seconds remaining to core meltdown to avoid disasters.
