GR2 - Designs
Scenario
Maria is senior in high school from Laredo, Texas. Her parents don’t want her to leave Texas but she wants to come to the East Cost. She really wants to be a lawyer but she isn’t sure yet what major she should be. Also, her culture is very important to her and she wants to go to a school where she can find people that remind her of home.
Maria has already gotten into four schools in the Northeast but she doesn’t have enough money to go visit the different campuses. She has already looked at all the information in the school catalogues and on their official websites, but she really wants to know what the students have to say since she’s going to make a decision without visiting the colleges.
She goes to the Campus Connect website and searches for her top choice, Yale. She looks through the main page and immediately goes to see the pictures. Then she looks through the reviews, looking for any reference to whether there is a strong Hispanic community on campus. She doesn’t see anything specifically related to this topic but she notices there is a forum so she posts a question about the clubs, events and organizations for Hispanic students on campus.
Aaron is junior at Yale, he’s an Economics major and he just registered for an account on Campus Connect because he wants to find potential new students that might join his fraternity. He gets to the review page for Yale and he writes a review about the Greek system. Then he posts some pictures of him and his brothers from Greek Week and a video from a recent event on campus. Finally, he goes to the forum where he sees Maria’s question and replies telling her about LULAC and some other clubs she might be interested in.
Designs
Design #1
Maria searches for Yale on Campus Connect and gets to Yale’s main page.
She goes to the Photos page and browses through the posted pictures.
She goes to the Reviews page to look for a review about the Hispanic community on campus.
She goes to the Forum page to post a question about the Hispanic clubs, associations and events on campus.
Aaron logs on to Campus Connect and goes to Yale’s main page.
He goes to the Forum page and posts a reply to Maria’s question.
Learnability:
- Each page has the same consistent sidebar so it is easier for a new user to learn how to navigate the website
Visibility:
- The links to each section about the current university are always visible
- The name, image, location and ratings of the university you are currently viewing is always visible on the left.
- The rating section can get lost on the screen.
- The text boxes to post a question or a reply in the forum are directly in the page, so that the user can see the questions and replies while posting his/her own
Efficiency:
- You can get to any of the sub-pages for the current university in one click, by using the sidebar
- You don’t have to do to a different page to post a review, question or reply.
Error Prevention:
- The front page doesn’t have any questions from the forum. Isn’t redundant enough.
Design #2
Learnability:
- This design is very simple and clean cut.
- The front page shows a snippet of each one of the subsections
Visibility:
- The front is too long. A user might not scroll all the way down.
- The front page gives the spotlight to the reviews which is the the reason most students will come to our website.
- There are links at the bottom to the different pages of reviews/questions so that the user knows exactly what page he or she is on.
Efficiency:
- The user must go to the separate page to post a comment.
- The topics in the forum are divided by category so that a user can find what he or she is looking for quickly.
- No way to tag a review for easy searching later.
Error Prevention:
- This is the only design that had order to the Forum section thus preventing some errors.