LO5: Feedback and Evaluation of Website

Feedback

The feedback from the five people who have used my site (see my "LO4: User Testing" post) has been positive. After they had finished using the site, they were impressed that all of the buttons worked correctly and all of the pages loaded quickly. Another thing that the users liked was the layout of the site - the house style/theme of the site was consistent on every page and that made the website easy on the eye and comfortable to use. Also, they found that all of the information on the site read well and was easy to understand. Overall, the impression I got was that the users thought the site was clean, easy to use and easy to navigate.

In addition to these five users, I got feedback from Giles Grover, the owner of Small Machines, after I emailed him. This was what he thought about the website:

Evaluation

Below are the strengths and weaknesses of my site, based on user feedback and my own opinion:

Strengths:

• The site is easy to navigate and feels smooth and snappy
• The house style is easy on the eye and gives the website a clean look
• The text is large and easily understandable, perfect for the target audience of parents.

Weaknesses:

• Some of the photographs on the website don't perfectly fit their frame and look slightly cut-off
• It isn't very easy to tell which page you are on from the header - the colour of the name of the  page you are on is very similar to the colours of the other page names.
• The yellow of the buttons contrasts with the rest of the site and the background might not have been the best choice.

One thing that needed changing on the site, based on the test plan, was that the "buy" button for one of the machines on the "Our Machines" page didn't work - nothing happened when it was clicked.

I had forgotten to add a link to the button, so I immediately corrected this by adding to the button a link to the shop.

As mentioned in the "weaknesses" section of the site, one thing that could be improved on is the fact that it isn't easy to tell what page of the site you are currently on, when you look at the header. This is because the colour of the name of the page you are on is very similar to the colours of the other page names.

In the image above, I am on the "Our Machines" page, and you can see that the highlighting of this page name is a very similar grey to the rest of the page names. So this is something that could be improved - I could change the highlighting colour of the current page's name to a different colour. The only possible downside of doing this could be that it might distract from the user's experience of the page they are on and make it slightly less immersive.

Another improvement I could make is making photographs in the gallery pop-out of the page to fill almost fill the screen when the user clicks on them, so the user can see the full photograph in more detail. 

Currently, the images aren't as big as they could be and they are slightly cropped in order to make them fit into squares and rectangles, as you can see above. So this is another improvement that could be made.

Another suggested improvement was that I should mention, on the homepage of the site, who the target audience is for Small Machines. Since the majority of people visiting the site would be parents looking to buy toy kits for their children, I would add to the homepage something like "making toy kits for 8-80 year old kids" as Small Machines' Twitter page says.

Above is where the user thought that this information should be, to save a potential buyer from having to look around the website to find out what ages the products are suitable for. It would be clear straight away whether the product is right for them/their children.

Another improvement that I could make to the website would be to add a "reviews" section, where any buyers of Small Machines could write about what they liked about the product and what could be improved, if anything. This would benefit the site greatly because it would allow users to see what other people's views of the Machines were, maybe influencing them to buy. The only downside to a feature like this would be people leaving spam comments or leaving negative reviews just for the sake of it - however, this could be easily prevented if the reviews could only be published after I had seen them and accepted them.

Finally, based on Giles' feedback, two small tweaks I could make to the site to make it better would be changing the colour of the buttons (he believes the yellow is too contrasting with other elements of the site) and changing the background to a different type of wood (Giles believes the current background looks like laminate flooring rather than what the machines are actually made out of).

LO4: Test Plans

a) navigation
I tested navigation in my test plan by asking users to test all of the key elements of the site, such as buttons and the links in the header to all of the different pages - for example, "when you click on "more", does it show you more information about the machine?" I also asked all of the users to scroll up and down the pages, making sure that everything worked correctly.

b) internal and external hyperlinks
I tested internal and external hyperlinks by asking users to test all of the links that go to other pages of the site, as well as links that go to other websites, such as the shop. I asked questions such as "when you click on "buy", do you get taken to the part of the shop for that specific machine?"

c) page load times
To test page load times, I asked users to make sure that every page loaded within three seconds. I picked this figure because obviously loading times can depend on the speed of the internet connection - I felt that as long as a page loaded within this time, then that was reasonable.

d) performance of website when using different browsers
In order to test the performance of the site on different browsers, I made sure that all four of the most popular browsers at the moment (Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox) were used in my five tests.

e) consistency of house style
To make sure that my house style was consistent, I asked each of my five users what they thought about the layout, design and and colour scheme when they had finished using it.