Names:

Osman Khwaja, Jae Lee, Prakhar Agarwal

Links to Individual Posts

Jae Lee – Jae’s Notes

Osman Khwaja – Osman’s Notes

Prakhar Agarwal – Prakhar’s Notes

Discussion:

Question 1:
– Menu system is convoluted and not representative to the high volume usage. The most often used thing (the pulldown menu) takes up very little space whereas things that one almost never considers (contact info, hold, more services) takes up a larger majority of the screen.

– Navigation is wacky. The student center is listed under multiple spots (Favorites, self service, and main menu, and has its own link). It is extremely redundant and not intuitive to try to navigate through this site without practice.

– Fix the display usage problem. The pull down menu (which is used most of the time) should be displayed prominently on the screen while things like holds and campus connections should be minimized or something.

– Clean up the navigation by including a top-level menu which is highlighted. It would allow you switch into categories that makes your sub-options easier to find. For example, you should be able to select Courses which would then let you select add, swap, and drop. You should also be able to switch into Payroll, which would give you access to the variety of options that are currently hard to find.

– Get rid of the home page, and potentially make the Student Center the home page, after making some UI updates.

Question 2
For the most part, we found issues which we then matched to Nielsen’s heuristics. However, in some cases it did help to have the list in front of us. In particular, I only thought of the problem with the error message in the add/drop/swap section after reading about how a proper error message should be constructed.

Question 3
The standards are pretty solid, but we would have some improvement for those. Some of the heuristics are pretty general, and they apply to a wide variety of different errors. For example, the consistency and standards is a pretty broad option. One way to break it down would be to make new heuristics that say “Follows current, successful trends for layouts of presented options” as well as a “Presented options operate as described” to replace the “Consistency and Standards” one.

Question 4
– Does the heuristics system properly describe all the errors of all systems or do the nature of some application interfaces correspond only to a certain set of issues?

– Do you think the heuristics are too broad or too specific? Explain.