Web Designing Task Designs and Think-Aloud

Question: Discuss about the case study Web Designing for Task Designs and Think-Aloud. Answer: Introduction: The Pine-Sol website, designed mainly for the desktop computer, have been developed to be manipulated using a pointing device, such as a mouse. In HTML5 and CSS3, this allows the pointer to hover over a particular element. This allows the item to be highlighted without triggering or activating it. However, hovering is an interaction style used mainly for pointing devices. It does not work well on mobile devices that do not use a pointing device (Silver 2013). The hover system is work on the mobile device. Mainly most of the mobile device is not use the pointing device. For the mobile device, one alternative solution is used that is the tooltip. The tooltip is used mainly in the pointing device (Frain 2012). The tooltip performs in the mobile device and provides the same experience like hover technology. When a user operates the website via their mobile, the tool tip provides small popup box which contains the detail of this point. This is the primary purpose of using the tooltip. According to Davis, Leak and Jiang (2014), the two most widely known techniques that are utilized for evaluating websites are the Hallway Testing method and the Heuristic Evaluations. The author is of the opinion that the Hallway Testing method takes an account of the elements that an user would require to click on so as to conduct the intended action, with the aim of evaluating the extent to which the users feel comfortable while navigating through the website. Researchers Lynch, Schwerha, and Johanson (2013) emphasize on the fact that Hallway Testing method can be efficiently used while testing a website for the very first time. On the other hand, the heuristic usability evaluations method is essentially utilized by IT personnel having expertise in the domain of interface designing: usability tests utilizing heuristic usability evaluation methods require experts to review the website under consideration with the purpose of comparing the same with the usability aspects considered acceptable by industry standards (AlRoobaea, Al-Badi, and Mayhew 2013). In the following section of the paper, the results of usability tests conducted on the Pine-Sol website : the results of the Hallway Testing method would shed some light o the ease of use of the said website whereas, that of the Heuristic Evaluations would highlight the usability issues of the web pages. Hallway Testing: The following information was revealed while conducting the hallway testing methods: Images of various Pine-sol products were hosted on the home page of the website, along with text boxes containing several other information: clicking on these images (and text boxes) revealed information regarding the item being clicked on (Wang et al. 2015). While enlisting all the products of the organization on the home page allows the users to find the products at a go, finding any specific information from the website becomes difficult. The developers have made an attempt to discourage the users from clicking on the website: however, once the directional arrow heads are clicked, auto-scrolling starts in the intended direction which does not stop until and unless the mouse pointer is clicked at the center of the page (Silver 2013). Thus, it can be said that the website has still not become click free. The zoom in and zoom out option are not available: However, such features are widely used by aged and disabled persons, and the absence of these features would discourage such users from browsing the website. Heuristic Evaluations: Conducting the heuristic evaluation tests on the official website of Pine Sol revealed the following usability issues: The zooming feature has been disabled on this particular website: restricting this feature would essentially discourage the aged and/ or customers having poor eyesight from utilizing the site. The scrolling system utilized by the developers does not function appropriately: an attempt was made to make the website click free, yet clicking is required to stop the continuous scrolling of the website on one particular direction (Burke 2013). The heuristic evaluation of the website revealed that pages lack responsiveness. The following improvements can be included in the website: 1. All information regarding the products of the organization need to be hosted on a page separate from the one which holds other notices/ offers, such that the users can easily find out the items being searched for. 2. The addition of horizontal and vertical scroll bars should be included : the inclusion of these features would facilitate the process of enhancing the ease of use of the customers (Burjek 2013). Besides this, the inclusion of the scroll bars would also allow the potential customers to gather information about the various products developed by Pine-Sol as they scroll down the pages. 3. It was observed that in order to gain a complete over-view of all the products and information provided on the webpage, the users require to scroll through a couple of page in both horizontal and vertical directions (Frain 2012). Thus, it is being recommended to the developers of the site to make the pages responsive such that the pages fit automatically in the device being used to browse the site. 4. The zoom in features should be included in the website, such that the users having poor eye sights can use the site easily. Figure1: Paper based Prototype (Source: Created by author) Figure 2: Paper based Prototype for mobile (Source: Created by author) References AlRoobaea, R., Al-Badi, A.H. and Mayhew, P.J., 2013. The Impact of the Combination between Task Designs and Think-Aloud Approaches on Website Evaluation. Journal of Software and Systems Development, 2013, p.1. Burjek, J., 2013. Responsive web design (Doctoral dissertation, Veleu ilite u Varadinu, Veleu ilite u Varadinu). Burke, K., 2013. Using Responsive Web Design for Better SEO. Davis, D., Leak, O. and Jiang, S., 2014. Usability Evaluation of Engineering Research Center for Compact Efficient Fluid Power Website. Advances in Ergonomics In Design, Usability Special Populations: Part II, 17, p.416. Frain, B., 2012. Responsive web design with HTML5 and CSS3. Packt Publishing Ltd. Lynch, K.R., Schwerha, D.J. and Johanson, G.A., 2013. Development of a weighted heuristic for website evaluation for older adults. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 29(6), pp.404-418. Silver, M., 2013. Exploring interface design. Cengage Learning. Wang, L., Law, R., Guillet, B.D., Hung, K. and Fong, D.K.C., 2015. Impact of hotel website quality on online booking intentions: eTrust as a mediator. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 47, pp.108-115.