Week 2 - Heuristic Usability & UX Observations

This week's user experience post is tagged with the Heuristic Usability ratings. Each of the five postings will state if the website is user-friendly or not, give a rating of 0 - 4 based on the information below, and list bullet points from the Heuristics principle to show why it received that rating.  Hopefully, this is interesting to you.

According to the Usability Heuristic for User Interface Design posting from NNGroup.com, the following should be followed:

1) Visibility of System Status - I looked at this bullet as if the page is loading or running the information, that there is a page letting you know that so the user doesn't believe the system is frozen or never processed. 

2) Match between the system and the real world - The site should be for outside users and use words that make sense to someone who has never heard of the company or visited before.

3) User control and freedom - Having a "cancel", "go back" or something of the sort is important just in case a click happens by accident.

4)  Consistency and standards - This is pretty self-explanatory. Having a consistent look and layout.

5) Error prevention - Ensuring you've tested various scenarios so users won't experience errors often and great messaging if it occurs.

6) Recognition rather than recall - This is a big one, have all options and as much information visible so users don't have to remember or go back while completing tasks on the site.

7) Flexibility and efficiency of use - Give the user options to do a quick or more detailed experience. 

8) Aesthetic and minimalist design - Remove/Limit irrelevant information

9) Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors - Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no error codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.

10) Help and documentation - Somewhere  for the user to get help via a document and a real person

My Blog Rankings Key:

0 – This is not a usability problem

1 – Cosmetic problem

2 – minor usability problem

3 – major usability problem

4 – usability catastrophe; imperative to fix

1. Craigslist - https://atlanta.craigslist.org/ (Blog Rating: 2)

The popular consumer posting website, Craiglist, has gotten a bad rap over the years, mostly because it's ugly. However, after reviewing the usability heuristic concepts, I feel that there are only a few minor areas for improvement with that model. It could stand to limit irrelevant info and improve its flexibility of use and did I mention that it's just ugly?

2. Klarna - https://www.klarna.com/us/klarna-stores/#  (Blog Rating: 0)

These popular buy now, pay later companies are popping up everywhere. Klarna is a popular one that has a pretty decent website and interface to allow users to make their purchases and split the payments into 4 parts. While I don't see an area to allow users to see the status of the system, everything else is pretty user-friendly. 

3. Publix - https://www.publix.com/ (Blog Rating: 2)

Well, shopping turns out to be a pleasure on the publix.com website. It's easy to manipulate and generally find what you need. Where it needs improvement is in the area of flexibility, error prevention, and minimalist design (however, I guess they are trying to sell more to you so I guess it makes sense to have more landing tabs with products that the customer didn't look for).  

4) Dollar Tree - https://www.dollartree.com (Blog Rating:2)

One of the more difficult aspects of this assignment is finding bad websites to talk about. Dollar Tree came to mind before I visited it as a possible bad because a while back I knew I felt it useless. Well, they've made some updates. Now you can buy products on dollartree.com (even though its usually in bulk). This slight addition definitely raised my score and made me review the website in more detail. I am proud of the progress, but there are some areas of improvement, including ensuring the search allows the users to limit the search to items for purchase vs the blog, they could improve, recognition and user freedom but they have made progress.

5) ACME Laboratories - http://acme.com/ (Blog Rating: 4)

They must have meant to publish this to just their intranet. The website is kind of bad. It kind of misses the mark on all the points and I can't really find any redeeming qualities outside of it having a google search bar at the bottom. Just look for yourself.