Digital Writing 350

Usability Project Report

Professor Bagwell

Robert Jacob Winkler

4/20/16

Usability Report

The following is a written report on our usability project for our digital writing course. In this project we will view a website and some of its features. We will determine the overall usability of this website to be adequate or inadequate compared to most website standards. Most websites are designed for viewers to access the website easily and in the most efficient way. Most websites are designed by professionals who have a background with software development. This is important when thinking about our critique on certain websites. When evaluating these websites, we will be looking at usability of the website. What is Usability? Usability is defined as how an object is used and how easily it is used.

Our professor did not give us limitations on the website we could choose for this project. I am a sports fan and visit sports websites regularly. I thought it would be intriguing to find a sports website dedicated to providing viewers and readers with information based on the sport. That being said, I chose a website called baseballnews.com. This website was chosen for several different reasons in which we will discuss in this report. I enjoy sports and wanted to incorporate that into my search of a website. This website had some obvious issues which made it a great test subject.

The usability of this website is not very adequate when compared to other websites of this genre. MLB.com is a commonly used website for baseball fans, so I decided to use this as my reference point for an adequate website, in regards to usability. Prior to this report, I constructed a presentation of visual aids for this report. In this presentation, I made an overview of the test subject and gave recommendations for changes to this website. The presentation also included a broad scope for research into the usability or lack there-of, for baseballnews.com. This report will include the research found on our test subject and all of the vital information needed for changes to occur. Below is a picture of MLB.com that will show an example of a website with great overall usability.

The next step of this report is to list our inspection goals. Inspection goals will cover how we will critique baseballnews.com according to the “Wave Tool”.

1. Inspection: 2. Locate the selected website via the wave tool.3. Find structural errors that hinder efficiency 4. Find color contrast errors that hinder viewers with eyesight disabilities.5. Determine the overall usability of this website according to another website with

a common subject.

When viewing this website, we used a tool for finding errors on web pages that may not been caught by the common eye. This tool is known as the “Wave Tool”. The Wave Tool finds structural errors, color contrast errors and many other errors that may inhibit one from using a website efficiently. While using the Wave Tool, we kept a web browser open of MLB.com for a reference point. After factoring in the Wave Tool results, we found the following results of errors. For instance, there are not many visual aids that encourage readers to view all components of this website. It is not very appealing to the eye of the reader, which is usually an attention tool for websites. It had many structural errors on its home page. An example of a structural error is the linked image that does not include alternative text. An image without alternative text results in an empty link.

It also has some color contrast issues. As the information above states, the website had 41 counts of very low color contrast. The contrast issues are related to the low contrast between foreground and background colors. This is important because adequate contrast is necessary for all users, especially users with low vision. The overall usability of this website is below average compared to the rest of the websites I visited in the same field. Below is a picture of the Wave Tool results of baseballnews.com.

This picture shows all of the overall results from this webpage. It covers the general errors of this page and highlights the issues as you move through the website. In regards to the structural errors, this tool points out errors that may hinder the reader or viewer from navigating through the website efficiently.

The next step in this report is to offer recommendations of improvement for this website. When including the wave tool results, there is some important changes that need to be made for a drastic overall improvement of usability. First, the website needs an overall upgrade on features. The features of this website are outdated when compared to superior websites such as MLB.com. We recommend the website to be revised by a digital website designer for visual improvements. This should also include revision of structure. This would include empty headings, missing links to other pages, color contrast issues that hinder viewers from properly viewing the website.

We will now offer a “Usability Test Plan” for this website. A usability test plan is essentially a broad scope plan that will feature a list of steps for improvement on the test subject. In regards to this report, we will be using a focus group for our test plan. We offer a randomized focus group of baseball fans that view subject-related websites regularly. In this test plan, the focus group will be placed in a computer lab with a list of goals. In this list of goals, there will be a number of steps that include navigation through the test subject. After this task is completed, we will offer a written brief questionnaire. This questionnaire will ask a few questions about their experience. The questions will determine how easily the website was used for the list of goals. Most importantly, the questionnaire will include a description box. The description box will allow the focus group to offer their opinions of the overall usability of the website. When all of the tasks are finished we will collect the data and analyze it thoroughly. The results will allow for baseballnews.com to improve their website for overall usability in the future.

In closing, the overall goal of this report was to offer a definition of usability and find a website that did not meet that definition adequately. We selected this website and used it as our test subject for the report. We stated our overall goal and the tools that were used for acquiring data for our recommendations. After stating our recommendations, we offered a usability test plan to help the website become more efficient for its viewers and readers.