M23CDE Usability

M23CDE Usability

Second Assignment – Usability Redesign

Preamble

The purpose of this assignment is for you to practice some user centred prototype design work.  Due to the short duration of the module and the time available this task is fairly directed.  However, it should give you some insight into the process of user centred prototype development.

The design problem:  Seven Social

Imagine that you are a usability and user experience design expert travelling in Europe.  Your plane lands in Dublin, Ireland and you decide that you would like to eat out that evening at a restaurant where they serve traditional Irish food.  Your Google search brings you to:   http://www.sevensocial.ie
…and immediately, your usability and UXD sensibilities are offended.  This is a website that is not selling the restaurant to you very well.So you decide to use a few of your Usability and Design techniques to redesign their website.

Overall Brief
Overall, you are to re-design a prototype for thissite:

How to do this assignment

Stage 1 – Analyse the usability problem with the website
Use a rapid evaluation technique (such as a heuristic analysis or perhaps a focus group with other students) to identify between THREE and FIVE usability issues with the Seven Social site. Please only conduct a brief analysis and write it up in less than 500 words.

Stage 2 – Identify the key information and functions that international visitors might need to use the services of Seven Social.
… Book a table online, order a delivery, see the menu, find the restaurant … It is up to you to choose the most useful content and functions.

Stage 3 – Develop a paper (or other) prototype redesign
Following your assessment of the website, you should develop a low fidelity ‘paper’ prototype that addresses the issues with that you have encountered.  You should present this prototype as an interface design (one ‘screen’ or small set of linked ‘screens’).  You can use paper and pencil, HTML and CSS, PowerPoint slides, Photoshop, MSPaint or any other method to produce  this prototype – try and develop a ‘home page’  that ‘gives an impression’ of how you would redesign the current resource.

•    Be mindful of addressing the core problems that potential customers encounter now with the Seven Social website.
•    Be mindful of providing a simple navigation system to assist customersachieve their goals.
•    Be mindful of embedding good visual principles (e.g. the use of contrast, similarity, alignment, proximity and closure) into the design to aid readability and information ordering.

Feel free to annotate the prototype with explanatory notes– highlight the functionality that your finished system will deliver (i.e. how it will work).

Stage 4 – Participatory design: Involve a few users in discussing or improving the redesign.

Using your re-designed prototype application involve one or two people to interact with your prototype.  Observe and listen closely as they interact.  Do they understand clearly how to use the website?  Can they ‘walk through’ an information finding task?  Identify any problems or opportunities uncovered by your users. Either note improvements to be made to your design or annotate alterations on the prototype interface.

Write up you findings (less than 1000 words).  Describe how (or even if) the user involvement method led to any alterations of your initial prototype.  Annotate any changes you made to the design.

Finally, please include a short reflection on whether collaborating with participant users aided you in your redesign task.

Assignment Rules

The rules for this assignment are as follows:

•    This is an individual exercise.

•    Reports should be around 2000 words in length (less is OK) and should be accompanied by a prototype redesigned Seven Social website.  This is a suggestion not a word limit.

•    Please note you should not waste time transferring content or doing graphic design. LoremIpsum is perfectly acceptable (Google loremipsum!)

•    Your report is to be uploaded to Moodle by: 11.55 pm on 31/07/15.

•    The name of the file that you upload should be in the format “yourlastname_studentID”

•    Your skills in using web design software or coding ARE NOT BEING ASSESSED.Paper prototypes will be assessed as equivalent to web pages.

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