Week 1 - User Experience Basics, Methods and Examples

Hello All! My name is Alisa Routh and I am a Software Engineering student at Mercer University. For the Multimedia and Wed Design tools course I am taking this semester, I will be posting weekly about various platforms and concepts. This task will aid in my learning and hopefully help others understand the importance of this amazing medium. 

For the first week, we were asked to read two articles on Usability.gov; one titled, "User Experience Basics" and "Methods". They were both concise articles to assist the public in creating platforms that are beneficial to their particular audience. In the first article it highlighted the importance of understanding your users, their needs and their strengths and weaknesses. This all should be used while also remembering what your product or service is and merging all those topics together to create something of high value for the consumer. In addition to high value, the other factors highlighted were to test if it was useful, desirable, accessible, credible, findable and useable. Just as the terms sound, the definitions reflect the actual meaning, capturing whether or not a person finds it needed, easy to use, evoke emotion or appreciation, easy to locate, and if it is trustworthy. These concepts are based on the User Experience Honeycomb developed by Peter Morville, a information architect who has been in the field since 1994.  

The article also highlights how user experience professions are co-mingled with other disciplines to ensure the design is user focused. Some of these areas include project management, user research, information architecture, content strategy and web analytics. If all these groups work together, a successful product can be created that benefits both the user and the organization it is servicing. The Methods article dives deeper into the tasks that can be done to successfully pull off this goal. It has additional articles and resources to help creators. The site was extremely useful and detailed.  

With all this in mind, I set out to find three websites that were successful in creating a great user experience and three that were not. Below is the result. 

The Good - Example 1: https://www.aarp-lifeinsurance.com/

AARP is a life insurance company that markets towards those who are in the later part of their life. Its goal is to educate and get their customers to purchase their life insurance. The website is clean and it immediately displays an area to collect customer information so a mailer can be sent out to them. This makes sense as there are many people within the older generation, do not understand or use technology that easily. By having that information application, it allows them to collect the data and send out a mailer or reach them by phone. I believe the website is usable, useful, desirable, valuable, accessible, credible and findable. 

The Good- Example 2: https://www.amazon.com

 The website is visually appealing and I personally have bought a lot of items from the site. It is such a great site that it is the leading online retailer. Amazon's target audience, are middle-class, tech savvy people. It is definitely accessible, valuable, useful and credible. If I had to find an area to complain about I could say that it is sometimes difficult to find things on the site. If I am looking for a particular item in a department (i.e. technology, outdoors, etc) and I decide to sort by price, it sometimes gives items that were not in your original search criteria. For instance, if I am looking for a case for my computer, I type in the actual name of the laptop and case at the end. I immediately get decent results, but when I sort by lowest to highest price, I don't get cases anymore, I get things that are not relevant so the price sorting is often flawed.

The Good - Example 3: www.cigna.com 

Lastly, on my "good" list for this week is cigna.com. This is a health insurance website that has a customer base that reaches across spectrums. They have to stay generalized because their users of all different ages. On the main landing page you immediately see important information, and a header that lets you select who you are (individual, medicare, employer, etc.) I love that because now I can ensure I won't see information that is not relevant to me. 

The Bad - Example 1: https://www.art.yale.edu/

Its so interesting that a school of such high quality has such a poor website. It is busy and hard to find exactly what you need. I get that they are probably "trying" to be "artistic" with the site, but it is not demonstrating that well. 

The Bad - Example 2: http://itcorp.com/ 

This website is just lazy. They have a website stating this is a software storage and consulting firm but literally have no information on the website. It states that is is purely for the sake of having an online presence and they are not actively seeking new customers, but even if that is the case, a little more effort could have been used. They should at least have an about them section, contact information that is clear and concise. I don't think they achieve any of the fundamentals of a good website.

The Bad/Ugly - Example 3: http://www2.pnwx.com/

This website is a blast from the past. They are using every color in the options and does not consider if ti will be easy or difficult to read. It seems like they just used colors they liked for no reason instead of picking a theme. It may be desirable and accessible  for those who are looking for these type of devices, but I definitely question its usability and credibility based on the design alone.

 You can read these Methods and User Experience articles yourself at https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/user-experience.html and https://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/index.html.