Thorough analysis and planning are perhaps the most important steps when designing or re-designing a Web site. The analysis consists of figuring out:
- What information do we have already?
- What information can we expect to have in the future, either near-term or long-term?
- How is the information currently organized?
- Who is going to be using the information?
- How well does the organization of the information work for the purposes of the target audience? (That is, can people find the information easily?)
- How is the information going to be organized internally? That is, where will we keep all the HTML files, images, style sheets, and other resources?
- To what extent will the internal organization of information match its organization in the site's navigation?
The analysis phase is therefore concerned primarily with the abstract structure of the site. The pages in a site are organized: they have been divided into groups, assigned labels identifying them, and linked to one another in a structure. When you are visiting a web site, you only see one page at a time. You cannot see the whole structure of the site at once. But it's vitally important to have a clearly defined structure, because without one the site is difficult or impossible to navigate.
During our analysis phase, each group will produce three documents:
You'll need to meet outside of class. Parlin 102 is open to you, and you'll have access to the teacher folder and all the applications we have on the classroom computers. I also suggest communicating over email will all group members. It is very important that each group member understands and follows through with their role within the group. Please establish clear roles and tasks to ensure that everyone has a voice and that everyone's voice is heard and valued.
Requirements
- Hand in a communication brief. Post this in your group folder. I want all of the members of your group to file a work sample in their Learning Records with a link to the communication brief; I'll write comments once and post copies to all group members via their Learning Records.
- Hand in a content inventory and a site map. Again, put them in your group folder, and all group members submit a work sample in the Learning Records. File separate work samples for the content inventory and the site map.
That's a total of three work samples — one for the communication brief, one for the content inventory, and one for the site map. Every group member should submit every work sample, and I'll give the same comments to each group member on each work sample.
Additional resources
From Alertbox
- Durability of Usability Guidelines
- List of 10 Usability Heuristics
- Guidelines for Visualizing Links (May 10, 2004)
- Change the Color of Visited Links (May 3, 2004)
- Reduce Redundancy: Decrease Duplicated Design Decisions (June 9, 2002)
- Deep Linking is Good Linking (March 3, 2002)
- Site Map Usability (January 6, 2002)
- First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users (August 5, 2001)
- Eyetracking Study of Web Readers (May 14, 2000)
- Is navigation useful? (January 9, 2000)
from Usability Testing and Research by Carol M. Barnum