Blaire Barlow
November 8, 2015
WRIT 350
Professor Andrew Davis
Website Usability Report
Executive Summary
When trying to research a website to test usability on I found that using a website
that I am on a lot would benefit me more than a website that I only use from time to
time. The website that I chose to run a usability report on was The Odyssey Online.
At first glance the website is mostly just seen through articles being reposted from
the main webpage. When those links are clicked on one only sees the pop ups and
advertisements. Which to a viewer is extremely discouraging. But when further
researching and actually searching for the homepage I found that searching for what
you really want to get a hold of is actually harder than you think.
Introduction
For this introduction I will give the reader a run down or “road map” for the
procedures that I used for the findings in this particular usability report. When first
googling The Odyssey Online you as a user is given the opportunity to see the links
to the about, employment, and etc. When going to the webpage you do not see any of
those links to click on unless you look extremely carefully to the bottom right hand
side of the page. This is completely misleading as a user. The only things one sees
on the homepage is the search bar and popular articles scrolling down the bottom of
the page.
Inspection
In this report the reader will receive a full evaluation of http://theodysseyonline.com/.
When using the Wave Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool I found many errors for the
website I researched. The website that I researched was http://theodysseyonline.com/, the
odyssey online is a popular website for users interested in many different things. This
website is a place for writers to write their thoughts out for the enjoyment of the reading
audience. Personally I find myself always sharing items from this website on my
Facebook page or in general via email or even texting the link. I realized that this website
first had errors when the amount of pop ups and ads ran across the page were in the way
of the actual articles. This was extremely frustrating and hard to deal with when going
through the website. The odyssey gives the viewer the options to research what they are
interested in, however pop-ups and advertisements are not interesting to many viewers.
Findings
The list of errors I found after using the WAVE Web Accessibility Tool was extremely
lengthy. There were a total of thirty-six errors. There was a missing form label, an empty
button, and thirty-four empty links. There were only two alerts, one missing first level
heading and one no-script element. This is something that as a user we can't see by the
naked eye, I found that the use of the wave helped me better understand the errors of this
web page.
The five types of heuristics that I chose to talk about for this project are visibility of
system status, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, flexibility and
efficiency of use, and aesthetic and minimalist design. Visibility of system status is “the
system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate
feedback within reasonable time” (Nielson). This is seen through the scrolling articles at
the bottom of the page. However, this particular website does not do a good job with it.
User control and freedom means “users often choose system functions by mistake and
will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having
to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo” (Nielson). There is not an
area for this in this website. This is something that is very important in a web design.
Consistency and standards means “users should not have to wonder whether different
words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions”
(Nielson). With his heuristic there is no words or actions show on the webpage, which
there should be. Flexibility and efficiency of use “unseen by the novice user may often
speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both
inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions” (Nielson).
The homepage to this site is so simple that this applies to only a few things. Aesthetic and
minimalist design “dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely
needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of
information and diminishes their relative visibility” (Nielson). This does not hold true for
this website. Something that should be resolved is the communication for this web
design.
Recommendations
The recommendations that I have for this website is their lack of communication to their
readers and viewers. Yes this website is main form of communication a blog style but as
far as the links go there might as well not even be any because you cant find them. I think
that their design team should go in and take a look at their homepage because that is the
selling point to a website.
Something else that I recommend is that they figure out how to stop the advertisements
throughout their articles. Viewers are reading the articles to read the articles not watch
continuous pop-ups and ads come in between paragraphs.
As far as layout I personally like the simple layout. This gives room for creativity of the
writers for the website to shine through.
Usability Test Plan
In my usability test plan I think it would be beneficial to fix all of the small issues before
the larger ones. Something like the ads and pop-ups is something small however I feel
like the viewers do not click on the website to view ads or pop-ups they are there to view
the articles that they wish to read. Something else that is important is the way that the
user searches the articles they want to look at. They are based on key words but there is
such a wide range of things to search that anything could pop up.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the viewer sees that there are multiple things on this web design that needs
to be fixed. The list of errors I found was extremely lengthy. There were a total of thirtysix errors. There was a missing form label, an empty button, and thirty-four empty links.
There were only two alerts, one missing first level heading and one no-script element.
This is something that as a user we can't see by the naked eye, I found that the use of the
wave helped me better understand the errors of this web page. Eventually, I believe that
these things can all be fixed.