Artefact 3: Evaluation

Artefact 3: Evaluation

My third artefact looked at the effects that design can have on hand-held device application navigational experience. This was followed from the last artefact where ‘navigation’ was identified as one of the main contributing factors in browsing around a redeployed website. The last artefact was steering away from my objective and resulted in focusing back on this with the next artefact.

The creation of the application interfaces began with constructing several wireframes, based upon different navigation positions and types. Three designs were designed in Illustrator in order to correlate with the survey questions. The questions was based upon navigation content and touched upon how users of applications navigated around, providing them with selective answers to each question. In order to help understand the questions, several illustrations were created to sit alongside these answers; this provided a great visual representation for a greater response.

The survey was created and distributed thorough Instantsurvey; an online survey manager. This provided a quick and productive way of collecting responses, which resulted in collecting fifty two responses. Analysing the survey resulted in the following summaries; 'scrollable navigation' (65%) is preferred over 'menu style' and 'pop out menus', 'black text on white' (42%) is preferred over other combinations, both 'visuals and symbols together' are preferred together than separately on navigation links, 'navigation links' (81%) are preferred over using a 'search box', a 'medium' amount‘ (69%) of content is preferred over 'large' or 'small' amounts of content.

The design and construction of the interfaces were better than initially planned; this was due to allocated researching time beforehand into application UI. If I was to do this again I would have allowed more time for creating questions, this could have helped in gaining more in-depth information into the navigational experiences on hand-held devices.

Artefact 1: Evaluation

A survey was conducted to discover what the underlying contributing factors are that hinder a user’s internet experience on a hand-held device. The survey was targeted at over eighteens and was distributed though the online survey manager InstantSurvey. This allowed for multiple branching systems; which provided a quick responsive way of sectioning questions based on user responses.

The survey was structured into segments to divide hand-held device internet users from none-internet users. I would then be able to identify individual problems that user’s encountered whilst using the internet. I could have improved this by adding more questions to gather extensive information on users, with whom, don’t use hand-held devices.

The survey resulted in finding out that the more frequent internet users on hand-held devices thought that ‘speed’ was the main problem when performing tasks. This however remained constant with the participants who didn’t use the internet on their device as frequently. Another interesting outcome was that less frequent users when asked ‘if they would like the view full websites on devices’ resulted in no responses. This shows that the majority of participants don’t expect to view all content of an original desktop website.

If the artefact was to be repeated, I would have changed the questions to be more specific and detail such areas as browsers and certain devices they use. This would have resulted in having individual devices and being able to identify the associated problems. It would also provide useful feedback to which devices to use for my next project.

The next artefact will be based around speed on internet browsers and their effect on hand-held devices. I will be creating an application using Android and building with HTML5; this will be analysed using cameras and will be tested in focus groups.