Group Exercise I

Group (5 minutes): Locate and write down the URLs for 3-4 college web sites (1 for each team member)

Each team member (10 minutes): Look on your site for

1. Attractiveness: good use of color and graphics (do you like the way the site looks?)
2. Clear navigation
3. Fitness for the purpose of the site (is the purpose clear?)
• for potential students
• for current students
• for parents of potential and current students
4. Clear writing
5. Consistency
• subpage navigation
• use of space to indicate hierarchy of information

Each team member (10 minutes): present your findings to the group.

Group (5 minutes): choose the best and the worst site from your team’s sites.

Group Exercise I (continued)

Class: I will choose someone from your team to present your findings and to participate in a usability study.

Group Exercise II

Group (5 minutes): look over the sites on http://www.designinteract.com/sow/archive.html and choose a category:

• Art
• Products
• Technology
• Services (Law offices, banks, hospitals etc)
• Not-for-profits (schools, orchestras, colleges)
• Make your own category

Group (10 minutes): Write down 6-8 sites (2 for each team member, collectively chosen if possible)

Each team member (homework): Report to the team on your 2 sites. Look for:

1. Attractiveness: good use of color and graphics, good layout control
2. clear navigation
3. fitness for the purpose of the site (is the purpose clear?)
4. clear writing
5. use of standards
6. consistency
7. subpage navigation
8. use of space to indicate hierarchy of information
9. appropriate use of Flash – does it help or hinder?
10. Fast-loading graphics (right-click>properties)
11. Find some information detail on the site to be used in a user test.

Group (homework - get together in person or electronically):

• Listen to (or read) the reports of the other team members
• Choose (collectively) the best and the worst site from your team’s sites.
• Devise a user test - a task to accomplish
  • it can be on either site
  • it can be to "do" something or to find some detail of information on the site
  • the user who tests the site will be from another group
• Choose a person to present the findings.
• Choose another person to give the user test.

Next week: present your findings for class discussion.

Group Exercise II (continued)

User test - one team member asks a member of the class (not a team member) to locate an information detail (like the one identified in step 11 above).

• Test Giver: Do not use the same words as words on the buttons to describe the detail
• User: test the site by seeing how easy it is for you to locate the information

Class:

• Observe what the user does to find the information (no prompting)
• Record the results – successful, easy, blind alleys?

Group Exercise III

Each group should work on one of the following topics:

1. Accessibility to the visually impaired
2. Accessibility for the cognitively impaired
3. Device-independent design

Locate specific techniques to assist each group, and prepare a PowerPoint or web page presentation of your findings

Group Exercise III (continued)

Each group presents its findings.

Group Exercise IV

Find your favorite examples of Flash sites. Make a links page and send it to marthaedwards@swbell.net by the weekend.

Group Exercise IV (continued)

Each group presents its findings.

Another Group Exercise (We're not doing this one)

Each team member : Find 3 not so good web sites (It's not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes you have to make them yourself.) Here are some places to start:

• Web Pages That Suck - this is the classic, the original site to highlight the authors' idee fixe: Mystery Meat Navigation
• http://trfn.clpgh.org/About/bad/bad2.html - There's a quiz at the bottom that goes to a really bad page.
• Google: Try typing in "skating rinks" or any other type of business that doesn't yet use the web extensively, for examples of amateurish sites. It should not be our intention, by the way, to make fun of these sites (save that for big-bucks sites), but rather to identify the SPECIFIC ways in which you can tell that it is not a professionally-done site, and to come up with ways to improve our own sites based on the analysis.
• Submit your own site, or early examples of your own sites.

Get together in person or electronically and choose the 3 sites (out of 9-12) that are the most illustrative of techniques to avoid.

Another Group Exercise (continued)

Each group presents its Not So Good sites. Prizes are awarded to the group with the worst sites.