Week6_HCI Wireframes Needed

Running head: WEBSITE USABILITY EVALUATION 1

WEBSITE USABILITY EVALUATION 7

Introduction

The usability of a product for a prospect client is of high significance and it is essential to create an appealing and functional product. In efforts of testing the product usability, User Experience Developers apply a mechanism known as heuristic analysis; which is a tool for examining if the productivity of the design of an integrated product aligns with a set of user-specified controls for design. According to Nielsen (2020), heuristics determines problems in the serviceability of a product, which are afterwards fixed to enhance the usability and thus enhance the client experience using the product.

In a classic heuristics evaluation operation, the assessors scrutinize an integrated product’s interface and make inferences on its conformity with industry recognized heuristic guidelines, like the ones recommended by Jakob Nielsen that outline standards, conventions, and best practices. This document provides a comprehensive summary of a heuristic evaluation on a travel administration website, pinpoints the found violations on heuristics and offer recommendations on practical solutions to fix these violations.

The Reviewed Website

For this paper, a heuristic evaluation is conducted on Travelscape LLC’s Travelocity.com website. The platform is a travel-planning site that assists users search for offers in their travel plans and get along with their reservations in a single site. Being a platform that offers a significant info to travel plans, it is important that the interface be spontaneous and simple to study and utilize as required.

Figure 1.0 Travelocity Homepage

Scenario and Choice of site

In this case, a user aspire to reserve a round-trip back to his mother country for a day, leaving Saturday 2/04/2022 and going back the on Sunday, 3/04/2022. The user requires being in a position to select the suitable choice for the air travel, reimbursement capacity in instances of flight cancelations, and comprehending info concerning the journey. This was personal heuristic assessment of the site and compared the failure and success of the product against Nielsen’s heuristics. The research discovered any experienced challenges with usability of the website and the extremity of the challenges. The results of the investigation are outlined and practical recommendations are offered on probable interface modifications that would allow users to navigate the site without any challenges or getting any unclear info.

Analysis of usability flaws

The most critical usability issues found in the platform are allied to precision of info on the site that will direct user activities. There are some usability issues that infringe heuristic principles on the platform, which are explained in the next section of this paper and steer the provided recommendation on probable adjustments that can be carried out to the interface.

1st Violation: The user has challenge in comprehending the trip info showing leaving, interval of journey and wait duration for connected trips. As per Nielsen (2020), this is in infringement of the Help and Reconciliation principle. This info is offered on the site after the client substantiation of the flight reservation. Nevertheless, the user has to spend more hours in singling out the pertinent info and accurately classify the info. The principle needs that the user be offered with info that is brief and in context.

2nd Violation: The client wants to become aware of the available choices in circumstances of refunds of trip cancelations and the compulsions of the client if they want to change their choices. The piece of info offered regarding the trips show a twenty four hour free cancelation following the client snapping trip info. As per Nielsen (2020), this issue breaches the Error preventions principle. The website had originally showed a repayable trip checkbox to the customer. The customer is uncertain of the outcome of clicking on this option; would their travel voucher be automatically non-repayable?

Once done with booking their flight, the platform offers trip information which shows the free-cancelation policy which additionally raises misunderstanding on the choices presented to the client. By following this principle, this could contribute to a mindful fault since the user wants to formulate a decision with all choices outlined, whereas the design offers additional details after the user has finished navigating the site.

3rd Violation: The user is not certain of the suitable option to decide on when selecting an airport to leave from. According to Nielsen (2020) the issue breaches the Error Prevention heuristic principle. In his exploration for the suitable deal that would be more comfort and convenient, the user wants to select the best option on the most ordinary trip plans between the two towns he desires traveling to. This principle signifies that the design should minimize the conditions that bring on error like absence of info.

Design recommendations

With reflection to the revelation of the problems found in usability of the site, this part of the report offers practical recommendations that, when executed, will enhance the simplicity of navigating through the platform and minimize the misunderstanding in user activities and probable outcomes. Offer a mouse-hover design that outlines suggested flights on the chosen routes. It would assist minimizing the duration spend by the client on the site attempting to make a selection of the suitable means to select by having the info offered to them faster.

Design website navigation to offer a user with choices to review their choices prior to undertaking their actions. This would considerably minimize faults on the site when the users have a comprehensive list of their actions (Nielsen, 2020). By having a comprehensive outline of the needed info and ways to improve from mistakes on the platform, faults made in reservations will considerably decrease.

Design the interface to enable gratitude instead of remembering; when the client was assessing their cancelation choices, they fail to understand the refund policy of the organization. This raises concern in making the selections that would provide them the suitable deal. This info is remembered in another interface when the client is examining the final info that shows the policy. This guideline should have been shown at the starting of the booking process to assist in guiding clients options successfully.

Conclusion

In summation, this paper provides a comprehensive summary of a heuristic evaluation that was conducted on a travel agency website with the motive of enhancing user interactions with the platform and returns for the site. The activity reveals three key problems of usability with reflection to Nielsen’s heuristic principles and offers recommendations of the appropriate measures to espouse so as to offer a favorable atmosphere for its clients. Though they cannot be changed for user-admission tests, heuristics offer useful understanding on product usability and eradicates financial and ethical responsibility with real user tests. Offering a high quality product with usability metrics will considerably enhance the prospects of the product success.

References

Nielsen, J. (2020). 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. Nielsen Norman Group. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/

Nielsen, J., & Molich, R. (1990, March). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 249-256).

Preece, J., Rogers, Y., & Sharp, H. (2015). Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction. Chichester, West Sussex : John Wiley & Sons Ltd