Evaluation of Project

I have found that this whole process is key to success with any product design. In my case, it is extremely useful in building a user-friendly website that works for its target audience. A successful website makes a successful business in this day and age. Companies are becoming more and more reliable on the web because it is so accessible to almost everyone. It widens up the market dramatically and can drastically change a company's income. Websites are the new way to advertise, buy and sell products, but you won't do very well if you don't consider your target audience. Every company needs to be aware of the people their aiming their products at, to get their thoughts and feelings. The user-centred design process gives you steps to follow to get the product that your target audience will want.
A huge part of this process is testing. It is vital that testing is done so you know exactly what your users want. Working with a website, it is vital that it is tested, especially for navigational purposes. The designer may think it's obvious on what buttons go to what page because they've been working on it for some time and are used to it. To twenty different people, it might not be so obvious. Simple methods like paper prototyping can be used to test the navigation of a site. A site that doesn't make its users think about what they're doing is a site that works. If you get no complaints and positive feedback, then you're on the right track. Testing straight away will save you so much time and money in the long run, instead of paying to have a site made and then find out that people find it stressful to use because they can't navigate around it and then pay more money to have it re-designed. You can also get feedback on the look and feel of your product. Colours, fonts, layout and imagery are equally as important to have an aesthetically pleasing product. Simple questionnaires can easily give you the feedback and criticism you need on the look of a design.
Another greatly important task is analysing and evaluating research and test results. It's all well and good that research and tests have been conducted, but it's what you do with those findings that matters. Fitting the design of the product around the information you've found out is important, so it meets the requirements.
For this project, keeping a blog has been very useful to make note of what I've done as I've gone through this process. It's great for keeping record so I don't have to try and remember what happened during the tests and write up everything at the end.

My Designs

Here are the designs I made to solve the milk problem, which was the only one made, so no other midifications were needed:I also experimented with the look of the home page:

Design Specification

The design specification is a very important document in the design process as it contains all the information necessary for a designer/design team to produce a solution to the design problem and to show to a client. It splits the problem up into smaller categories to make it easier to look at. The document should list all the requirements that the product must meet, with any constraints that may affect the product. The customer (Sainsbury's in this case) should be consulted as fully as possible while the document is being made because their requirements are very important and are what the designer should be trying to deliver .

Screen Captured Usability Test

Unfortunately I couldn't get the last screen captured test to upload properly, so I did another test on myself, which I know isn't entirely fair because I've seen the site before, but it's just an example of what you would have seen if the other video had worked. Using the Camtasia Studio software you can follow my mouse and see where I click, as well as see my face and hear my voice describing what I'm doing. I shopped for three items: milk, bread and spaghetti, then checked out using false details.

Usability Test On Final Design

What would normally happen after the task analysis and the testing on the current design, would be an evaluation on the results and then a re-design if appropriate. The new design would then be tested as well, but in my case, I can't re-make a working prototype on the scale of the Sainsbury's website in the given time for this project. Later on I will be showing some of my own designs that would solve the issues found in the testing. What I've done here is tested the site as it is again, but adjusting the the task slightly and adding some questions to the de-briefing questionnaire. You can see from the images below the changes made. The script was kept the same.




















































































Here is the video recording of the test:

Usability Testing from michael bale on Vimeo.

(There was a problem uploading the screen capture recording. You can see what happened from the other video, but I will try get this one working.)

This user had no real problems using the site. Having never used the site before, they found the navigation layout was very helpful. There was one slight fault, which was down to the test organisers. The user thought that they had to log in first using the false details provided, but they wouldn't work because because those details hadn't been registered yet. This was the first time that this has happened, but it should have been made clear to the user that the false details were for after checking out.

Coming next in the next few posts will be a design specification document and my own design ideas of how the supermarket website could be layed out.

Paper Proto-typing

Paper proto-typing may seem a little childish, back to using glue and sticky tape like creating some sort of 'Art Attack'. However, it is a low cost and quick way of testing the navigation and basic function of your site so you can spot any problems and solve them early on in the design process.

Using the online shopping theme, a group of us created a paper prototype of a website and gave testers the scenario of buying some milk.

Here is the network plan we came up with:

We then created five pages which we were going to be using:

Homepage:

Drinks page:

Groceries page:
Dairy page:

Milk page:

We also had a check out page which thanked the user, a loading page if the computer had to add any additional things to the page and an under construction page if the tester selected a page we hadn't created and wasn't necessary for this scenario. As you will soon see from the recordings, the user was asked to navigate through the proto-type using a pen as the mouse, to buy 8 pints of semi-skimmed milk.


User A



User B



User C




As you can see, the milk was again a problem, like it was in the Sainsbury's site. People keep searching for it in the drinks section, so to solve that problem, the item should be added there as well as being in the dairy section. It will reduce shopping time and increase customer satisfaction. They won't get frustrated because they can't find what they're lookibg for. This could result in them using the website again and perhaps telling others how nice it is to use, therefor boosting the supermarkets profits.