Names:
- Dylan Bowman (dbowman)
- Kiran Vodrahalli (knv)
- Andrew Boik (aboik)
- Avneesh Sarwate (asarwate)
- Kuni Nagakura (nagakura)
Discussion:
- We encountered several severe problems in our evaluation. First, the home page is pretty cluttered with links and images that are not all entirely relevant. This belongs to H8, as it is a aesthetic issue. Another major problem was that there was no real help for using the website. There was a section of FAQ’s but it was basically a list of question and answer pairs on what to do in specific real world situations riding MTA transportation. There was no real help beyond this. This belongs to H10. One last severe problem was that there were multiple links labelled “schedule” on the home page that did not necessarily lead to the same information. This is highly confusing. This belongs to H4. These could pretty easily be fixed by removing unnecessary interfaces on the home page, adding help documentation, and making the links more descriptive in what they access.
- Problems that have to do with Help and Documentation (H10) were made more obvious having seen Nielsen’s Heuristics. As experienced users of basic websites, we don’t really require any documentation on how to actually use the website efficiently, however this is actually necessary for users with less experience on the internet.
- One heurisitic we would propose to be added would be some kind of metric to determine how appropriate an interface is for a desired action or information. For our system, some of the schedule links simply gave us a static table of times for all weeks and weekends that is extremely cluttered and difficult to read. Another heuristic we want to propose would be the accuracy or correctness of the actual information. In our situation, the pdf timetables for each transit line is not accurate–the table doesn’t account for local delays, etc.
- Possible discussion/test questions: Matching a heuristic to a problem. Prioritizing different heuristic violations and justifying why you chose to focus on this problem and not another
Links:
Dylan – https://www.dropbox.com/s/34yylen10hgotsk/A3.pdf
Kuni – http://dl.dropbox.com/u/62526404/Heuristic%20Evaluation.pdf
Andrew – https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9Qj9O_Quv4pempKRzlWLWZBa28/edit?usp=sharing
Avneesh – https://dl.dropbox.com/u/30768213/MTA_Review_Avneesh.pdf