Bereket Abraham, Horia Radoi, Thomas Truongchau, David Lackey, Jonathan Neilan

A3 – SCORE analysis

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i. Most severe problems with the site and which Nielsen’s heuristic it violates:

1 – problem: H9 – Informs of error, but no solution offered/ no information provided on how to fix it.

solution: Explain in more detail (like a question mark option) or inform the student of who to go to for more information/help

2 – problem: H2 – Difficulty in differentiating between pages: “Student Center” and “Main Menu” are two different pages, though for a student, the “Student Center” is treated like the main page. Also, the titles of the drop-down menus are non-intuitive.

solution: Have clearer links, and fewer options on the “main” page (offer question mark buttons that explain what the page is for)

3 – problem: H7 and H8 – Drop down menus have similarly named options that perform different tasks, but they all lead to the same page/link, and students have to continue to hunt and search. Also, there is no separation or marking between the most commonly used features and the rarely used features; all options are thrown together, and in small font to fit on one page.

Solution: Layout, place common options at top of page, and rare ones at bottom or not on main page at all, on another page/menu

4 – problem: H5 – Redundant “Enroll: Swap” option is unnecessary, and causes an error and has no error prevention for classes with conflicts or having less than 3 classes.

Solution: Better course enrollment design in general, just scrap the whole system and build from the ground up to be honest.

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ii. Problems made easier to find with Nielsen’s heuristics:

– We already knew what was annoying, but did not how to classify or quantify it.

H2: The “mismatch” between language from the system, and more intuitive language from the real world.

H1: We didn’t have any problems with this, but we would not have thought of it as an interesting issue without the heuristics list.

H8: We had a problem with the aesthetics, but hadn’t thought of the “minimalist” design concept as a way to improve visibility for a user.

H6: Recognition vs Recall is a good way to differentiate and classify problems we recognized with the system, we would otherwise not have known  how to effectively list.

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iii. Usability problems not mentioned in Nielsen’s heuristics:

– Navigation of the website. More specifically, we consider the order and number of links one has to go through to hit a desired page or option is important enough to be its own heuristic.

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iv. Useful class discussion points and/or potential final exam questions:

– What heuristics matter more (or less) based on the different interactive systems being used (e.g. a college student management site like SCORE versus a video game)?

– To what extent does the severity of certain heuristics matter based on differing interactive systems?

– How do people react when a system is changed, particularly if they have adjusted to and gotten used to the “bad” form of the interactive system (i.e. if we changed SCORE right now, how would seniors react)?

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Individual Posts:
Thomas – https://www.dropbox.com/s/ou7l44v6nrx0dpd/A3.pdf
David – https://www.dropbox.com/s/v8s5aayipqlku66/A3.pdf
Jonathan – https://www.dropbox.com/s/qogq09tvbea0heu/A3-Jonathan_Neilan.pdf
Horia – https://docs.google.com/document/d/10NysepSQYJACR_i5cTPeL6IomexX9agLb1gqmAr2WXw/edit
Bereket – https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9snfj5xhl6uvfl/severity.pdf