Hello You Beautifully Realistic World,
This week has been about learning and applying. usability.gov and nngroup.com, went over the importance of good design by teaching its' readers the ten heuristic principles. For instance, when considering a good design, it is good to consider not just how the user will interact with the system/software but how the system/software will communicate with the user. While conducting an heuristic evaluation on an assignment, it was demonstrated how imperative it is for users to be are able to seamlessly get through a web site, with minimal confusion.
For instance, one of the things that I addressed was the lack of help and documentation being offered to the users. It did not offer FAQs and the help that it did offer was a "Contact Us" form; As Kevin Kelly mentioned, society is looking for immediate responses (an hour to twenty-four hour wait is too long). Instead of "Contact Us" forms, I would suggest to do a chat option that shows status as to when it is read and when it is being responded to. Another issue that I came across was that it took too many different web pages to get to a particular task (which was to submit a paper). I think that the mid web site was unnecessary and if any necessary information was on it, it should be address on the origin page or the destination page.
Confirmations shown via web page and email portrays visibility of status, google date imports makes it that a user can save a date to a calendar with a minimum of two clicks. Errors were communicated to the user when required fields were not filled; when re-registering, it was able to state that the email was already associated with a previous attempt. The homepage highlighted the conference through effective graphic design trends.
While going through this evaluation, it does make sense that it would take more than one person to participate. It does take more than one pair of eyes to point out different violations; some may believe that certain characteristic may not be a problem but others might. It could be that some may suffer from expert blindness and that could keep them from thinking as an average user.
"We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be"
Don Norman
