A3 – Score

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Names: Adam Suczewski, Matt Drabick, Eugene Lee, Green Choi
I.

  • “Other Academics”
    • This seems like a violation of “recognition rather than recall.” This principle states that the interface should minimize the user’s memory load by making information visible. The “other academics” tab contains some of the most important on the page yet it is extremely difficult and unintuitive to find.
    • One way to fix this would be to rearrange the home page in order to showcase the most important information. Making important links for grades and enrollment more prominent would improve
  • Information overly pagified
    • This is a severe Efficiency of Use issue, information is broken up into too many pages, and in a non intuitive way. It’s seems like information such as grades or quintile information would intuitively be found on the “My Academics” tab. Instead it is a link on the enrollment->term information tab. The ‘term information’ subtab is not visible when the user is on the “My Academics” tab, where they would expect to find such information
    • Tabs could be merged together to display more information at once. For example, the ‘My Academics’ tab is just a single page, while ‘Enroll’ has several subtabs. Therefore, all of these tabs could be placed in one row, with My Academics highlighted to show its greater importance
    • Term information and My Academics could also be merged together. They are closely related by purpose.
    • While minimalism is important, it is equally important to not hide relevant information
  • Favorites doesn’t work
    • When you click the ‘add to favorites’ button (located in two places), on a subpage of the Student Center, it adds the Student Center main page to favorites.
    • Making pages like ‘My Grades’ able to be linked from favorites would provide a quick way to provide increased navigation efficiency without changing the underlying design.
  • “My Class Schedule”
    • The user is not given access to their own course schedule, while the front page shows a list of classes and times.
    • This seems to violate H9: Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors
    • It seems like the only way to fix this would be to actually allow access to the class schedule it shows during an enrollment period.
  • Enrollment appointments
    • When you click “View my enrollment dates” on “Term Information” in “Enroll” is displays an error message “You do not have access to enrollment at this time.”
    • This would again be a violation of H9: Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors
    • Instead it could actually tell you your valid enrollment dates or direct you to a Princeton website that shows when you can enroll in classes.

 

  • Lack of User Control and Freedom/Recovering from Errors
    • SCORE very frequently lacked simple, intuitive options for returning to previous menus or the main “Student Center” menu, especially when user interaction flow came to a halt in the case of errors or invalid requests.
      • This could be easily solved with simple “Return” or “Back” buttons on error screens or halts in user interaction stages.

II. Nielsen’s Heuristics

– The Help and Documentation problem was made much easier to find by Nielsen’s heuristics. We would probably not have thought to analyse this aspect were it not for Nielsen’s guidelines. We are all very accustomed to seeing unclear error messages on Score so we may not have second guessed them.

 

– Nielsen’s heuristics on Error Prevention as well as Recognition, Diagnosis, and Recovery in handling errors addressed issues that we may have easily overlooked, such as the ease of recovering from an error or issue on the site and the ease returning to normal interaction.

III. Non-Nielsen Problems
Privacy of information did not seem to really fall under any of the 10 heuristics. It seems like sensitive information (like SSN) was displayed on pages where the user would not expect that type of information to be displayed.

Likewise, the fact that Score is closed every night between 2am and 7am is not something a user should expect from a convenience store, not a website.

The site often has trouble allowing users to log in, giving the error message: “You are not authorized to log in to PeopleSoft HCM/CS”. This doesn’t seem to fit into an exact category, as one expects a website to give them consistent results when they try to log in and they are authorized.

IV. Useful Heuristic Questions
– A discussion of the most common and the most easy to fix heuristic problems may be useful. It may be useful to compile a sort of FAQ document for website projects, etc.
– A good final exam question may be to provide a screenshot of a website/app with some obvious and not-so-obvious heuristic errors, allowing students to highlight and explain them using Nielsen’s heuristics.
– Non-Nielsen problems may also be added for additional credit.
– A final exam question may be to provide improvable examples of interfaces and to ask for easy or creative ways to improve them given background knowledge of the user base and the nature of the service.

Links to our blogs:
Adam Suczewski: www.princeton.edu/~asuczews/A3.pdf
Green Choi: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/34418361/greenheuristics.pdf
Matthew Drabick: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8ozjibpzpdzq9y1/mdrabick%20-%20A3.pdf
Eugene Lee: http://www.princeton.edu/~eugenel/eugenel_A3.pdf