Human Factors in Designing a System
Question:
Discuss About The Design Guidelines For Homepage Usability?
Human factors in the designing of a system incorporate the inclusion of the human factors and its concepts along with the utilization of the human factors in the development of concepts and designing of the system. There are several factors which within the design of the system like the operations, reliability, safety, performance, measurements of the different limitations and the human factors. The human factor in the design of a system encompasses and focusses on the concepts which are used in the designing process, and it also includes the behavioural theory of the designing process and the other human factors. This provides an essential step of linking the human operators/users along with the design engineering. Human factors during the engineering process give an insight of the human behaviour during the human and machine interaction (Leva, Naghdali and Alunni 2015). This study is based on the creation of the 4 different hypothetical users and their interaction with the system; the second task is based on the user experiences of the system; the usability specification for the system; evaluation of the methodology through the establishment of the proper procedures and techniques; critique on the findings which are based on the human factors; the last part will be explicitly based on the critical evaluation of the whole assignment.
Five different kinds of users are created depending on the website usability and the hypothetical users are ones that will be doing extensive interaction with the website. Each of the 5 different users is taken into considering the usability of the website and the kind of information that the website is actually providing. The 5 different types of the users are as follows:
Gamer- The first user selected here is a gamer who uses his computer for gaming purposes and rely heavily on the performing accessories that will provide the cutting edge performances. This user emphasis a lot on the usage of the gaming controllers and the joystick which have the special options of performing the upgrades. The Atari best electronic website provides a one-stop zone for the upgradation of the joysticks, paddles. The different variants of the joysticks provided by Atari are CX24, CX52 and CX40 joystick and CX30 paddles. There are upgrades which are provided by Atari in the keyboard section.
Normal customer looking for service- The second user is a normal website user who is looking for the upgradation for his monitor. This normal user is looking for a multi-cable that will help him to run two monitors at the same time. This user can be a productivity user who can use 2 monitor screen for the purpose of image editing, video editing, and website designing. This normal user can be very specific in his product search in this particular website. The user is solely looking for the VGA monitor cable that can be effectively connected to two different displays or monitors at the same time.
Computer shopkeeper- The third user is a computer shopkeeper or seller who is looking for certain computer peripherals. The main aim is providing its customers with the specific type of upgradation and service in order to repair the defective computer peripherals.
Creating Hypothetical Users for Website Usability Analysis
A user who has a slight visual impairment- The fourth type of the customer is a user of the service of the Atari website and is also a person with a short bit of visual impairment. The website is designed with a big font size which makes it easy for a visually challenged person to navigate through the product and the services page.
A random web surfer- The fifth user is a sort of nonstandard user that do not have any specific requirements and performs a random search through the website in order to make himself accustomed with the upgrades that are presently available for the computer peripherals.
The five different personas mentioned above are the human factors. These human factors and their interaction with the system (here Atari website) will be analysed. The interaction of the humans and the website is noted, along with the usability and whether our users are finding it easy or tough to interact with the website. The potential of the Atari website and its user-friendliness is taken into account. The more human factors are considered during the design of a system, the more the integrative and interactive it becomes. The human factors in system design include the effective integration of the human element and the several hindrances that a human experiences during the usage of a system. The 5 personas are selected based on the differences in the way they interact with the system or the website. their level of interactive and the how the interaction provides them with the necessary information and their user experience is taken into account. The five personas are thus different in the way they interact with the system.
Website designing and the ease of using a website depends on the how easy it is to navigate, and how the design is planned keeping in mind the navigation within the home page and the other web pages of the same website. Website designing is an art and it gives an insight how a webpage of a company will create an impression on the minds of a user. The design of a webpage generally from one another due to the purpose with which it is actually made. The website of an XYZ company will obviously not be very complex and will not be complex. The design of an e-commerce website is, however, a complex job. An e-commerce website takes into account several aspects into its design elements. The design of an e-commerce website includes several criteria that will make it both feasible to sustain and at the same time make the website more user-friendly with the huge number of people that accesses it (Moczarny et al. 2012). The website “Atari Best Electronics” does not have a proper home page and it lacks the navigation pane. The information provided on the home page is cluttered with texts and needs to be sectioned. The website is visually unappealing according to the standards of 2018. The website is static and it lacks the dynamism. The users are unable to interact with the webpage and the webpage at the same time is unable to provide the users with an option to search and sort the product. A webpage is interactive and this can be measured if the users are able to query and at the same time, the website returns some specified data to the user. A static website is just the opposite of a dynamic website. The users are neither able to interact nor able to effectively communicate with the website. The huge number of the e-commerce website present currently are dynamic and they all are able to sustain a huge number of users at the same time. The users can be from any part of the world and may speak any language, however, the dynamic websites are able to handle different kinds of the users effectively (Graham, Hale and Gaffney 2014). The Atari website if analysed from the perspective of a user will reveal different kinds of errors in the design. The design is more suitable to the design which used to be in the 90s. At that time the design of the websites used to be very basic with minimal design elements and total lack of dynamic elements. A big navigation bar is required on the home page that will consist all the links to the products, services, contact us, about us. A provision for the search must also be included which will help the users to quickly search for a specific product. The homepage also lacks a proper highlighting feature of putting the most important and the costly products on the home page (figure 1) (Atari – Best Electronics Home 2018). The homepage of the Atari website is where the main problem with the design is. The homepage provides all the necessary information but is not in an organized form. The user has to search for himself and has to discover the necessary information on his own. The Atari website even lacks a proper structure, information is although provided, however, it can be said that the whole website is a clutter of words. Only the section that the Atari website wants to highlight is provided in texts that are coloured differently with respect to the other texts.
Human Factors and Their Interaction with Atari Best Electronics Website
The criteria upon which the usability of this website are: user-friendly, easily navigable, products can be easily searched, products can be sorted and filtered based on the price and product type, detailed information of the each of the products along with a zoomable image of the product, highlighting the most affordable products along with the costly products, product offers such offers must be highlighted on the homepage (Dingli and Cassar 2014).
- First of all, the best part of the website Atari Best electronics is providing a home page which is necessary for any website to get into the fact of what the website is all about.
- The font size selected for the website is quite big and is beneficial for the visually challenged people to read and recognize the text.
- The homepage clearly mentions that the website belongs to the Atari best electronics and it specializes in accessories and replacement parts for the customers that have the Atari computer system and the Atari gaming systems.
- The homepage has a mention of what the Atari Company is going to be released in the next 10 months, the homepage also has the exclusive mention of the best products update that the company is bringing to the market.
- If the website is liked by any user, then it can be set into favourites section by clicking a favourites dialogue box. The dialogue, however, works only in Internet Explorer.
- The new users that visit the website can be easily persuaded by the presence of the different awards that the company has received over the years.
- For any e-commerce, it is important for the website designers to include the customer feedback on the website. Integrating the customer feedback easily help the new customers to gain faith in the products that they are willing to buy.
- The website came up with the idea of putting the information regarding the buying the products from eBay and overpaying for the Atari products. This is good for the customers to pay attention to the Atari official website in order to buy the authentic products. The homepage includes a clickable box that takes the user to the index page or which is called a site listing.
- This particular page contains all the products listed and the different products are in shown with big font size with the contrasting font colour. Clicking on each of the product takes a user to a separate which has detailed information on a specific product along with a picture of the product itself.
- The new design that the company is can be suggested is based on overall revamping and redesigning. To begin with, the home page is the first place where the main revamp needs to be done. The first thing that the website needs is a simple navigation bar. The homepage is cluttered with texts throughout the webpage. The website lacks a basic navigability and easy highlight of the important section (figure 2). The homepage itself accommodates all the information and thus needs to be structured (Garett et al. 2016).
- The navigation bar can be customized by intelligently grouping the information into different sections. The prime sections can be product lists, contact us, about us and the service section. Along with the presence of a navigation bar, clever integration of a search bar (figure 3) can help the customers to search for the desired product easily. The navigation bar is the latest integration in all the websites that want to make the navigation through the website a much easier process. This increases the ease of interaction with a website. The navigation bar can be considered exhibiting the similar function like the contents of a book. The Navigation bar provides an option for the user to get a glimpse of the of contents of a website. The home page os the best place for integrating a navigation bar. The homepage is the first webpage that a user prefers to visit and thus an effective integration of the navigation bar make it easy for a user to navigate throughout the website (Ives 2013).
- The other features that can be added are sorting and filtering the products according to the price and types (figure 4). The customer reviews and the ratings can be integrated for each of the products and there will be options for the customers that are buying a specific product can give their positive and the negative feedbacks depending on their user experience (Garett et al. 2016).
- The Atari website completely lacks the design elements and thus, there is a plenty of scopes to include the animation and graphics into the design elements. This will make the website have an overall appeal and design revamp. The New (Cascading Style Sheet) CSS provides a plenty of design materials to include the overall design of a website. There is a wide range of the e-commerce that has the attractive looking design which makes the online shopping a pleasure (Robbins 2012).
- Another major new design idea that can be integrated into to the Atari website is the ability to perform an advanced search. The option for advanced search can help the users and the customers to effectively perform a search of a product that will have an added option of a filter (Laudon and Traver 2013).
Evaluation of an e-commerce website is carried out based on certain criteria like it is already mentioned previous part, however, there are other sections which need to be exclusively mentioned. The criteria are a navigation bar on the top portion of the homepage, a search bar with the feasibility of searching the products easily, sorting and filtering products with respect to the price and product type, about us, contact us, the privacy policy of the website, feedback section. The homepage must offer a visually appealing graphics that will attract the customers to look for more stuff on the website. Homepages need to be the best as it makes the long-lasting impression of the company that wants to promote its product (Huang and Benyoucef 2013). Thus, the company name must be provided on the home page so that it reflects the aims and objectives of the company (Nielsen Norman Group 2018). Another important is the usability of the website in terms of finding and discovering the new stuff on the website. The embedded option to perform a search is the best way to conduct a search of the products that are not showing on the homepage of an e-commerce website. The added benefit of a search bar helps the users to conduct a search and look for the products that are available in the database of the website. There are different types of the products that a company launches and such products must be easily accessible to the users visiting an e-commerce website. The next big criteria of evaluation are the presence of the suitable content that is tailor-made for the better understanding of the users (Goh et al. 2013). The content on an e-commerce website is the information on the different products that the users need to go through in order to get accustomed and gain knowledge about the products. The content provided must in a way that will be majorly focused on the customer and the language must be easy to understand. The content is nothing but the detail information of the products that are available in the product page. The information provided in the product description must be well structured consisting and highlighting all the necessary information. The content must not have the redundant content, like repeating the same information and providing the same of a single product in two different make the information redundant (Huang and Benyoucef 2013). The contents must be written in a lucid language that will help in the easy understanding of the content and at the same time will be persuasive enough to make the customer buy a product. Another important part of the evaluation criteria is the presence of the customer reviews. Customer reviews are a positive way of helping the new users to know about how the product performed with respect to the customers (Nielsen Norman Group 2018). The customer review act like impression and reflection of the customers that have already purchased and are using the product. Thus, providing scope for the customers to review and rate the product will engage the customers and if they are benefitted by buying a specific product, there is a greater chance the customer will visit the same site again to buy another product (Carmona et al. 2012). Also, it is important to note that there exist certain guidelines that do help an e-commerce website to grow and increase its customer base. The major difference between an offline and an online store is the lack of the employees that assist in managing the store. Consequently, the same does not occur in an online store, an online store needs to have all the necessary features and options so that it can be made more user-friendly and more interactive from the perspective of a user. An e-commerce caters billions of customers annually and the customers can be from any geographical area and can have different language set. Thus in order to handle such customers, it is necessary that the website must have the language selection options that will help the users to change the default language and select the language of their choice. The e-commerce websites put a lot of emphasis on the customer experience with the online shopping (Bilgihan 2016).
Website Designing Art and Its Impact on User Perception
Initially, the website Atari best electronics is found to be very basic and lacks a majority of the features that a dynamic webpage exhibits. There are different types of heuristic violation can be seen on the website and such violations are evaluated as under
The first and the foremost part is the homepage, the homepage delivers the most important impression to any user whether new or old. The home page design keeps the users glued and attracted to it for a longer time in comparison to the other websites that are not designed accordingly. The homepage of Atari lacks a proper design and is cluttered with long texts everywhere. This reduces the usability of the website and the makes it unfriendly. The Atari website has provided truckloads of information on the homepage just by making the texts colourful. The homepage lacks a proper structure there is no presence of a navigation bar (W3schools 2018). The purpose of a navigation bar is to help the users to quickly navigate to different sections of a webpage without any hassle. The absence of navigation bar makes it hard for the users to navigate and users need to manually perform a text search and look the desired contents. A properly navigation bar must include a list of the product, about us, contact us, privacy policy, feedback, user’s section, offers and deals section, search bar along with the option of filtering and sorting of the search outputs.
The homepage is although has the logo of the company and what it is all about, however, the major flaw is the design and placement of the information. The icon of Atari must be clickable and it must direct a user to the homepage. The information provided on the home page about the company is to be provided in the about us section. This keeps the design clutter free and presentable. The icon for the Atari is not well designed as it has a long text along with the coloured text of Atari (Lowry, Wilson and Haig 2014).
The products that the company had made before and the products that the company wishes to bring are all present together which again is not well presented. Instead of adding the infographics, the website has only presented certain product pictures along with the texts which are coloured. This decreases the appeal; the vertical scroll of the website seems unending with only coloured texts all over the body. This can be rectified if an auto-scrolling graphics section can be added, this increases the appeal and users find it attractive and easy to go through the new product and upcoming products. The offers especially can be highlighted so that it catches the attention of the users and the customers that are willing to buy. The offers section needs to be updated and for that purpose, an e-commerce cannot be kept in an un-updated condition for a very long. E-commerce websites handle too many traffic when too many people try to access its website (figure 5). Thus, it needs to be updated from time to time (W3schools 2018).
Atari Best Electronics Website’s Design Evaluation
The next heuristic violation is the presence of too many customer reviews in the home along with long texts. Positive reviews are necessary for a website to increase its name when the visiting users see positive reviews about the products of the company. The main issue is that on the homepage, the customer reviews must be provided, however, is a short form. This helps the new users to go through the comments and the reviews and can make a quick picture of what the website is all about and how it is serving its customers (Atashi et al. 2016).
Like every other e-commerce website, there must be a section where the company provides the necessary information when a specific user will face any issues with a particular product. Considering the Atari website, no such customer service number is provided. The website does provide a contact and fax number; however, a single number cannot handle calls from too many customers (Bosch 2012).
Websites come with the increased advantage of being dynamic and this helps the users to actively interact with the website. Dynamic websites are different from the static websites and considering the Atari website, it is a static website. A dynamic website provides a user with the added advantage of searching a product and the search results will display the available products. The search results can be modified by adding extra elements like sorting and filtering. Sorting and filtering can be done based on the newest and oldest product, prices of the products, product types, and popularity of a particular product (Chopra 2016).
Graphic design- graphic designs are the most vital part when the websites of this present generation are considered. The design of the website is either too flashy and missing on the important parts of the content. The next option that lefts out is that the if a website is not flashy then it has the plenty of vital information, but at the same time the information lack the proper structuring. The lack of proper structuring renders even a good website useless. This can be undone if the graphic design of a website is made according to the standards of the e-commerce website designing. The homepage itself provides plenty of scope for the effective integration and implementation of the graphic design. the graphics designs are tailor-made for each of the web pages of a website (Bonastre and Granollers 2014). So that the homepage has a completely different appearance with respect to the other subsequent pages. The design of homepage has to be different in comparison to the other web pages and due to this, the homepage provides the features and outlook that makes it different from the websites of other companies. The graphic design can be enhanced through the integration of the CSS (cascading style sheet) design elements. The design must be integrated in a such a way so that the homepage will be able to adjust to the different screen resolutions. The homepage must be designed in such way that without scrolling the first view will the highlight the necessary information. The background of the website must be in contrast to the graphic that is at the forefront. At the screen resolution of 1024×768, the website does not provide any option of horizontal scrolling (Kamoun and Halaweh 2012).
There are other design aspects like the user interface widgets that provide the text boxes, selection lists and the drop-down menus. These are the best way to attract the users and the customers that are visiting the website. The integration of the above-mentioned features on the homepage of a website increases its appeal and design effectiveness. The multiple text boxes must be avoided in order to reduce the clutter on the homepage. The upper section of the website must have the provision of the search bar, as this enhances the user interaction and the search bar can be effectively used by a user or a customer. Thus, the section which holds the search bar must not have any other text or the entry boxes. The drop-down menus must be used judiciously for the sections that are not self-explanatory. If the navigation contains a lot of items to show, then it is better to have the drop-down menus in order to accommodate the subcategories into the drop-down menus. It is always best to categorize the different items into a single list instead of organizing into separate items. The drop-down menus must be small because the long drop-down menus are difficult to operate. Similarly, navigation does not have a large number of contents, then it is better to have no drop-down menu at all (Lal 2013).
Bringing the human element into a system will surely increase the complexity, the complexities will arise due to the mixed problems that a system will experience from the different views posed by different humans interacting with the system. The best feature of the Atari website is that it is a static website which makes it fast to load. At the same time, the complete lack of the dynamic elements makes the website a totally unappealing to the users. For a visually challenged person it is although easy to read the text due to its big font size, however, the excessive usage of the text throughout the body of the homepage is making the whole webpage a clutter. The home page needs to be designed in such a way that it is easy for a user to navigate without much hassle. The website of Atari lacks a proper structure, design, and appeal. This can be improved by making the information and the content into separate groups under the navigation pane. The content provided is well structured and informative, however, lacks the form of presentation and formatting. The lack of zooming the pictures of the photos along with the lack of pictures of a single product from multiple angles is another drawback (Hasan 2016).
The homepage of the Atari website in the assignment is the perfect example of integrating the human factors in the system design. The human factors are none other than the different users that are used for designing the website. The first and the foremost part is the homepage that provides with the essential data for the critiquing portion. The website has the different that have already been highlighted from the above discussion portion. There are different flaws in the design portion and the general usability of the website. The most important flaw is in the homepage itself, and the homepage is designed with the static elements that make it one of the clutter looking website. The homepage is overstuffed with texts that are prominently found throughout the website and lack a proper structuring. The texts are although informative, but however, lack the proper structure and formatting. In order to highlight the important portions, the texts are kept highlighted with different font colour. There are different parts of the website are all presented in the single homepage with all the necessary information in a vertical scrolling fashion (Huang and Benyoucef 2013). This makes the information redundant and the users that will try to access the website will first find it difficult through the webpage due to the lack of any navigation bar. The lack of navigation bar can be like not presenting a user with the proper guidance. The Navigation bar provides a proper navigation to move through the different sections of the website. Thus, the lack of a navigation bar renders the website to lose its shine and usability. The different parts of the website are structured and this has resulted in an improper design. The index although contains the list of the products that are available on the Atari website, however, then it has not been clear that which products are available for the upgradation and which products are new. A proper categorization could have solved the issue of haphazardly keeping the products in the index page (Cyr 2013).
When the assignment was performed, there are certain difficulties like how to perfectly get advice and opinions from the other team members. Different team members were suggesting different opinions and viewpoints regarding the Atari website. After going through the website along with a different kind of information provided by the same, we amalgamated all the views into a single. The individual team members analyzed the different section of the website and came up with the solutions. The procedure of evaluation was partially based on going through the normal structure of the other e-commerce website and comparing the features that Atari website lacked. The huge number of the websites that are present over the internet, provides an insight into the design of the new websites. The latest e-commerce website provides an insight into the different design elements of a website. The different parts of the latest e-commerce website provided the design ideas, that can be effectively applied into the design of the Atari website. The high number of the websites over the internet are all distinct, while their basic design is all the same on all the websites. Thus, when the assignment is performed, all the group members went through the different design elements of the various e-commerce websites. The individual team members provided an ample amount of time into researching through the different books and the research articles that provided the vital information regarding the revamping the website. The vital information found is effectively integrated into to designing the Atari website. The comparison itself revealed a majority of the errors that later helped in suggesting the solutions of revamping the website.
Conclusion
From the above study, it can be concluded that human factors in the system design play a major role designing a system that has the capability of finely connecting and understanding the human needs and tastes. Designing a system does require the human inclusion of the human factors in order to make the system human-friendly. In this case, a website which can be considered as a system needs certain changes based on the ideas of some humans that either is part of the system of an active user of the system. Thus, the human element is necessary in order to bring about the certain changes for the benefit of the human itself.
Reference
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