LO5 - Evaluation

After looking through the user testing feedback there were no initial flaws in the design or the way that the weskit looked (house style etc). The user testing was carefully thought about so that no part of my website will not have been evaluated, therefor getting an overview of the entire website. I then went through my website again, this time as a critique rather than someone who was creating content. I realised that there were a few flaws in my website that I would personally change.  The most drastic thing I would change is the overall house style of the website itself. After careful consideration I realised that the website would look better if they have been changed to be in line with the small machine red cog, which is a major part of the branding.

Before





















After House Style Change to the Navigation Bar

 Here is an example of changing the house style on a major part of the website, with the red matching the logo, creating a more striking appearance. The red also contrasts in a very appealing way to the murky blue.


Other Changes

Another change I would make is to make the website more practical for a user interested in purchasing a product. Enabling the images in the store to be enlarged by a magnifying glass tool to help the user look at the high quality images in more detail. Ensuring they can see that the product will be decent quality.

About and Contact Information

The About page and the contact information was the biggest change I had to make to my website, and the thing I had to consider the most. I didn't want to come across as repetitive, but I did want the contact details on every page available. The way I overcame this simply meant making the contact information at the footer. But then I had to decide what the About page was about, I didn't want to remove the page entirely because it is a convention used on most websites. So I decided to use that page to write information about the website.

Example of the about page and contact information as a footer

LO4 - User Testing

For my user testing it was essential that I tested the:

a) Navigation
It was important that I tested the navigation food my website as I needed to make sure it was easy for the user to explore the website with ease, essentially trying to create a streamline experience for the very important customer. The way I have tested this is for asking questions about using the mouse to select different pages such as "mouse click on image" then I have a section to fill in if it succeeded or failed. 

b) internal and external hyperlinks 
In order to test for this, I made sure that my testers clicked on all available social media links and the Royal Armouries link to make sure that they lead to the correct pages. Also as my homepage contains a lot of links on it to other areas I made sure that my test plan had all of theses outputs and imputs clearly labelled, to make sure that they work for every user. 

c) page load times
As my website has a lot of images on it, to correctly illustrate the image I am trying  to portray for the small machines brand. I made sure that my testers where using a variety of different web browsers and operating systems when browsing my website to test the loading times on a variety of different platforms.

d) performance of website when using different browsers
I made the testers use different browsers while they tested my website to test the performance of it, they then marked on the test plan what browser they used and if there was any problem with it. The results came back positive for all of the browsers they used

e) consistency of house style
The house style is very important, as this website is for a business that needs to seem professional and have a certain level of consistency. I made sure that the testers checked the colour scheme across the website and make sure that it is uniform on each page. I also made sure that the selected fonts were consistent across the website and products.

LO4 - Final Website

Link to Website - http://09hartshornj.wix.com/smallmachines  

LO4 - User Testing

Navigation 

Judging by my user test plans my navigation works fine, the navigation bar works correctly and can lead the user to each page that has been named on it. This includes the Home, Store, Hydraulics Range, Royal Armouries Range, YouTube, Blog, About pages, all lead to the correctly titled page with the necessary content on it. All of my links at the bottom right of of the website that lead to social media work fine, these include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google Plus each ones leads to the small machines social media page for the specific site. On the YouTube page my user test plans indicate that YouTube videos play on the site as they have been embedded correctly.  

Internal and External Hyperlinks

     Each page opens on my navigation bar in a correct manner, and leads to the labeled page. Also the social media links open up other websites, to the correct social media page. Also the subscribe button at the top left of the YouTube page works in a correct manner and will either come up with a google log in to fulfil the action or it will just subscribe the user to the YouTube feed if they are already logged in. 

     Page Load Times

     My page load time doesn't seem to vary between the devices that my users tested it on. Which varied between Apple Macs and Windows Computers. All the content loads up on each of the pages. The image gallery on the About page takes the longest amount of time to load up, but they load up in a fair amount pif time that isn't time consuming in the slightest.   

     Performance of Website when using Different Browsers

      

     My website works fine on the three browsers that it was tested on including, Chrome, Safari and Firefox. There is no noticeable difference on each of the browsers which is an ideal result as Chrome and Firefox have the most users on them. 

    Consistency of House Style

    The House Style of my website is consistent between each page, with a grey and white theme throughout each page to try and give the website an appearance that looks professional and not tacky. Also the logo is consistent at the top left hand side of the page, this also links the user to the home page which is a convention of most websites. I have also used the same fonts throughout the website as well as the same style purple line that helps separate information. 
    Improvements

    Even though my feedback was all positive looking back retrospectively there are quite a few things I would do differently or change. For example I would have made the blog fit more into the house design by giving it grey or blue arrows as opposed to green. The green works fine but is just a little inconsistent compared to the other pages.
      External links, I need to remove fancy as it seems unprofessional as no other real companies use fancy.