Assignment 1: References

2011-04-07T19:40:00.000-07:00

Dix, A., Finlay, J., Abowd, G. D., & Beale, R. (2004). Human-Computer Interaction. Essex: Pearson Education.

Felke-Morris, T. (2009). Web Development & Design Foundations with XHTML. Boston: Pearson Education.

Horton, S. (2006). Access by design. A guide to universal usability for web designers. Berkeley: Pearson Education.

Assignment 1: Website Review

2011-04-07T19:27:00.001-07:00

My chosen topic for Part B is Emu Flight Centre, so the website I will be reviewing is the premier regional airlines of my local area, Rex Airlines. Located at http://www.rex.com.au/

The Rex Airlines website allows users to book flights online for their airline service, display current specials as well as offer accommodation, vehicle hire and flight insurance options in the flight destination. The target audience for the website therefore is internet savvy potential customers. The aims and objectives for the website are to offer a complete holiday/business booking package. I believe that it does meet these objectives, the ticket ordering process is thorough and straightforward, however its homepage – as you will see below – is a mess.

The website will primarily be critiqued using the Web Design Best Practices Checklist (Felke-Morris, 2009, pp. 200 - 201). The three criteria that will be assessed are:

Layout
Navigation
Accessibility

Layout

I can honestly say that my investigation of the Rex website was pretty shallow – I didn’t drill down too far, but I still found the layout of the Rex website to be terrible. Perhaps the only positive comment I can make is that on the homepage and the flight booking page, there was a clear contrast between text and background. While the repetitive information (header/logo and navigation) was not consistent, it did not take up more than a quarter of the page, so make that two positives. Actually, the site did have a Page footer area (which alternated from left to centre alignments) – but it does exist, so make that three!

Referring to our Best Practices checklist for Page Layout (Felke-Morris, 2009, p. 200), criteria one and two are:

Consistent site header/logo
Consistent navigation area

During my investigation of the website I came across three different headers – the one on the homepage is different to the header for the flight booking, the company info pages contained the same header as the homepage, but was stretched across the screen. As for consistent navigation area; the navigation options for ‘Abour Rex, Travelling/Flight Info, etc’ from the home page are unavailable once I have entered the flight booking. Once I have selected a page from within these navigation links, all of these pages contained a submenu showing the other options available. That is, except for Travelling/Flight Info, which, no matter which option I select, gives me a flight/hotel booking feature inside the sub menu that was normally set aside for navigation.

Criteria Six (Felke-Morris, 2009, p. 200):

Good use of basic design principles: repetition, contrast, proximity, and alignment.

There really is no repetition across the website. The design of the homepage does not match any other page, pages from the navigation links all conform to each other but nothing else and then the flight booking pages are a different design once again.

Lastly, the homepage is cluttered with too many different things trying to vie for my attention.

Navigation

There are four things to look for when looking at a single web page:

Knowing where you are
Knowing what you can do
Knowing where you are going – or what will happen
Knowing where you’ve been – or what you’ve done

(Dix, Finlay, Abowd, & Beale, 2004, p. 205)

From the main page, booking a flight – the primary goal of the website – is pretty simple. By using highlighted navigation options, as well as page titles, the Rex website allows you to know where you are. Hyperlinks within pages are highlighted in a different colour allowing us to see what we can do. As we advance through the flight booking forms, our progress is easily visible up the top of the page – with each stage of the booking progress categorised to let us know what will happen.

The Rex webpage really drops the ball when it comes to knowing where you’ve been – or what you’ve done. Apart from the progress bar for ticket booking, there is no real depiction of where you’ve been – there are no breadcrumbs through the company info webpages to let you where you have come from, hyperlinks also stay the same colour once they’ve been clicked so a user can’t tell where they have been.

Lastly, I found that returning to the homepage was difficult, some pages contained navigation aids at the bottom of the page that had a home option, on other pages my only option was to click the logo located at the top of the page and hope that it took me home and lastly, using the hotel booking feature located on the home page, once I was inside the feature, I couldn’t return home at all!

Accessibility

For universal usability, designers need to support the adaptability of the Web by anticipating variation in their page designs and by creating pages that transform gracefully. (Horton, 2006, p. 36)

In this regard, the Rex website is great. I can transform the webpage by enlarging type or narrowing the browser window and it holds up well. As for other positives in terms of accessibility:

The website uses its logo colours of blue, white and orange throughout the website and these are colour blind friendly.
All images have alternate text.

However keyboard browsing is rather poor (nonexistent on the homepage) and links should really be underlined, not just change in colour.

Improvements

In terms of the core function of the Rex website – booking flights – the website is actually extremely good, it is the site design that lets it down. The layout should be consistent across every single page; there is too much change of design between pages – Geocities has been shutdown, this style of web design should be too. The design should also be created with much more accessibility in mind. All of the negative comments I made above come from haphazard design springing from what could well be different projects mashed into one website. To sum up how the website could be improved:

Consistency.
Consistency.
Consistency.

two.one.six

Assignment 1: References

Assignment 1: Website Review