Overview

Another week just passed! That means that there is now another blog made, this weeks blog is going to talk about how to make your users happy by implementing some user experience design into your website. Some of the the things to do are obvious but others may not be thought of before looking at them. Overall, they are not ‘required’ but heavily recommended if you want to improve your website.

What was learned

These are some rules that Shneiderman has made and he calls it the ‘8 Golden Rules of Interface Design’. These basically dictate what a website should include to have a good design:

1. Strive for consistency - Don’t have different styling across pages, rather have one way to do things (eg menus, popups, and colour scheme).
2. Seek universal usability - Are there some nice and easy ways to use the page for power users (eg keyboard shortcuts), and is the page designed for the target users.
3. Offer informative feedback - Make sure the user is knowing what is happening at all times (eg uploading a file - show the progress).
4. Design dialogs to yield closure - Does the user know what they are doing (eg dialog box), if not then fix this for the intended audience.
5. Offer simple error handling - Minimise the amount of errors that can occur, and if they occur don’t confuse the user with them.
6. Permit easy reversal of actions - Since users like being in control and might make mistakes, make it easy to undo what they just did (and even undo of the undo - redo).
7. Keep users in control - Don’t surprise the user (eg random popups), rather make them feel like they are the ones in control.
8. Reduce short-term memory load - Make sure that the user doesn’t forget the page/ what they are doing because otherwise they might get confused.

Reflection

If you could do last week again, what would you change?

If I somehow got position of a time machine (or just hade some advice to give to my other self), I would have spent more time trying to work out the differences between all of the 8 rules. I would also spend time working out what they all mean, this is because it will provide me with a better understanding on how to critique an other website (what the exam is going to be about).

Where did you encounter struggles, and what was done to deal with it?

Some of the struggles that I encountered were trying to understanding each rule and how they were different. My method to deal with it was to look at other rules and use look at the remaining to determine what they all mean. This was good and successful because after woods I now know how they link to each other, but also how they are different. Luckily, they are mostly self-explanatory and if there were issues deductive logic and Google helped.

What are your next steps?

My next steps for this week are to do the exam (Tuesday), I will use all of the information from today and from other weeks to be able to do the exam. For what I currently know, the exam is basically we are given a website, we look at it and then write an essay explaining how good or bad it is. These rules are probably the best way to determine if it is good or bad quickly. I will also do some preparation to do beforehand to have the best chances (might look at other websites and judge them).