Requirements Statement
What is it?
An improvement of usability on The Greenhouse Trust website.
What does it do?
The website promotes the building and its amenities such as the bookstore, café and garden. It also promotes climate change projects in the area.
Who is it for? ***
Middle class demographic aged between 15-75. Students will want to go in and buy the books they have on sale for £1 each and find out more about artist opportunities. Middle aged men and women may want to visit the café for food and drink in the week or at weekends. These and an older generation will be more likely to afford cases of organic wine.
When/how are they going it use it? ***
It will available for desktop, tablet and mobile through a browser. This enables it to be used at any time on any of these platforms.
What are the benefits/key selling point?
I will greatly improve usability and user flow through the website. As a result of these online adjustments, visitations to the café will improve and they should see an increase custom and revenue.
What key constraints/limitations need to be taken account of?
Communication to and from the client could be slow and temperamental. Time constraints can result in the project not living up to prior expectations. Visitors to this website may be from a non-technical background and if too many changes are made, they might not enjoy it and the project may have an opposite effect. I will be only relying on the information given to me from Tigger and I won’t be able to ask the users directly via focus groups etc. I won’t be able to do everything to a great level of detail because of the scale of the project.
Prototype Planning
To be able to produce a prototype, I needed to figure out what exactly to focus my attention to. To prototype a whole website in a week would be a big task so I will not yet be as the web pages as such. Alternatively I will simulate a menu bar which improves upon the information hierarchy. To help shed more light on the intricacies of the site I thought about what the specific functionalities are and how they would be executed. I broke these down into two questions main questions “What does the user want?” and “What do we want to prototype?”. I thought about the key things the website has to offer and decided that the following were important elements to include.
- Information about the café
- Organising & prioritising information
- Links to social media (Facebook, Twitter)
- Make the donating process simple with an obvious call to action.
- Responsive and mobile friendly
- Downloadable content including the café menu, wine list etc…
- Branding on theme
- News and event pages accessible from the homepage
After completing this task I was able to decide on the main things my prototype should include. I will be creating it with a heavy focus on information architecture, menu options, and content management.
Risk Factors
Prototyping the information architecture of a website is complex and can, therefore, pose a lot of problems. I will have to take the content of the whole website into consideration and figure out what is the most important. It will definitely have to be an evolutionary prototype because unfortunately, this first iteration will not be using the data of the survey I will be putting out. It will be using my preconceptions of the potential user groups and my research of the company rather than real life data. This could lead to me making the wrong decisions due to ignorance and lack of knowledge. To overcome this problem I will be asking my testers to get in the mind of my user personas I created in the user research phase.
Secondly, and following on from my previous paragraph, I’m really concerned that I won’t get the survey questions right. I need to tailor them to a wide audience to be able to break that down into more defined target audiences. This will have a direct effect on the way I structure certain pieces of the website and even what will be available to view from the front page. I will be OK during the prototyping phase because this will revolve around the information but it is still an overarching factor to keep in mind throughout the rest of the project.
Another risk factor is that I will only be using the information and content already on the website because there is already an abundance of it on there. My first draft prototype will be more concentrated on sorting through it all rather than adding new sections. This could, however, be a massive issue because I fear I will be sorting through information that isn’t relevant or needed and it has just been left there due to neglect. It could waste time and I might end up missing things that need to be included. Having said this I still think this is a valuable task to perform because it will get me started and give me something to evolve from. I’m hoping that by working through the current content I will think of things that are missing and be able to develop on my prototype like this.
The last risk factor I am considering is that it will be so different from what Tigger knows now, there is a big chance he won’t like it. Not just with the information architecture but it can also have a knock-on effect on the aesthetic of the website. When I start on the core production, the things that are currently featured on the home page may not be advertised in the same way. Hopefully, however, if I do my job to an adequate standard it will be obvious enough what route the user should take through a website to get to where they need to be.
Test Rationale
For my prototype, I will be making a navigation bar system and some dummy landing pages. I won’t consider the UI so much as I want to concentrate on whether the user can navigate the website with ease.
Hypothesis: The current navigational system is ineffective, long-winded and confusing. This leads to a time-consuming process every time the user wants to complete an action. I predict that with organisation and procedural structuring I will be able to greatly improve this time frame and the user should be under less stress to finalise a task.
Methodology: A/B testing.
Method: I will first give the test subject a task on the current website and record the time and page clicks it takes for them to complete this. I will then ask them to do the same on my prototype using the same recording methods.
Prediction: I expect to see a substantial decrease in time scale and less total navigational clicks.