Attempt an in-depth evaluation of the following website: Website: http://media.telstra.com.au/home.html What to Include The purpose of the report is to provide a critical evaluation of the nominated website and to support your observations and recommendation convincingly. Your report should be based on the desktop (e.g. Windows, Apple OSX, Linux) versions of the website. Your report should include: (1) Clearly identify the nominated website. Provide an overview and description of the nominated website. (2) Identify and elaborate the main feature or features of the website. (3) Identify the positive and negative aspects of the website. Draw particular attention to the interaction and usability aspects of the interface. (4) Invite two other persons to review the nominated website. These participants can be your friends, family members or classmates etc. Include their comments in the report. Provide the background (i.e. age, gender, profession) of the participants. Do their views differ from yours’? State why or why not. (5) Based upon your critique and observation in items (1) to (4) of the above, provide a recommendation on how the website should be improved. Conversely, if it does not require further improvement, then provide the reason why that this is the case. (6) Except for item (4) of the above, all assertions relating to HCI design principles (e.g. statements like ‘blue text on red background is a poor colour combination’ ) must be supported by references or critical observation. You can cite additional scholarly references other than the textbook. (Note: Do not use Wikipedia as a source of reference). (7) Figures or diagrams can be added as needed. Format of Report As a minimum, the report should contain the following: (1) Introduction – State the purpose and objectives of the report. (2) Discussion – Build your arguments into a cohesive thread, presenting your observations and findings that you have collated from section (1) to (4) from ‘What to Include’ section. (3) Recommendation – This is the section where you present your recommendations. (4) Conclusion – Summarise your findings, consolidating and drawing attention to the main points of the report. (5) References. Assignment 1 Website Review – Some Help and Guideline Author: Dr. Andrew Chiou (24 March 2017, rev 0.1) Dear Students, This is a brief guideline I am writing to help external student’s undertaking this course without the benefit of face-to- face lectures or tutorials. For those enrolled on-campus, please approach your lecturers for further help for further insight specific to your campus. Fundamentally, the first assignment involves that the reviewer (that’s you) critically analysing and commenting on a nominated website. The review need to be carried out against HCI principles that have been covered in the first three weeks. The purpose of this assignment is to provide you the opportunity to experience what and how to go about reviewing and evaluating a website. As this experience will help you in evaluating your own design in the forthcoming Project A and Project B. What better way to gain the experience of critically reviewing someone’s else design, before applying this to your own. To complete Assignment 1, there need to be some structure on how you approach your review, analyse and report your results. Following are some steps to help you get started: With reference to the Assignment 1 Specifications, you first need to understand what needs to be carried out (What to Include, pg.1). Complete this. And secondly, report what you have completed previously into a Report (Format of Report, pg. 2). In short, you carry out the action, and then report. And thirdly, submit this as a doc or docx file. Following is the format of how your review should be presented as a report. You can use it as a guide to fill in what is needed. Remember, be succinct and precise in your report. Max number of words is 1,800. In the following notes, the black text is a direct copy from the assignment PDF. The blue text are my notes. Underlined test are subtitles you can use. Introduction  PREAMBLE. Clearly identify the nominated website. Provide an overview and description of the nominated website. 4 to 5 sentences should be adequate.  FEATURES. Identify and elaborate the main feature or features of the website. What are features? Features are added-value element or component to any product. These are not necessarily part of the main functionality, but something ‘special’ added to the product. For example, the hour and minute hands found on a watch is not a feature. These are the basic functionality of a watch. If you remove either the hour or the minute hand, the watch stops being a watch. However, if a chronograph ring (the outer ring that that can be rotated to 2 keep time) is added to a watch, it can be reasonably considered a feature. It is added value, in additional to the basic functionality. With or without a chronograph ring, the watch continues to fully function as a watch. Got it? For example, the hyperlinks found on a website are not features. These are the basic elements of all website. Without them, a webpage cease to be a webpage. However, if weblinks are included in a bread-crumb (Google this up...) line up, then it can be considered as a feature. Discussion  CRITICAL REVIEW. Identify the positive and negative aspects of the website. Draw particular attention to the interaction and usability aspects of the interface. You start off by defining the parameters you are looking for. Eg. The 8 Golden rules: consistency, minimises error etc. Then based on these parameters, you crtically look for the implementation (or lack of it). If you detect this on a webpage, then say so why it was well done or otherwise. The way you get a feel of this is to check sufficient number of sample pages. You don’t need to do all the pages, just a selection to support your discussion. For example: “One of the 8 Golden Rules in HCI design is to permit consistency in a user interface. In the nominated website, this can be found in the ‘next’ page button that is implemented in the pages under ‘online-order’. However, consistency was not well designed in the ‘return’ to page buttons. There were no clear indication whether the ‘return’ button would nagivate users back to the previous page or to the main page. In some cases, this website allows both. This goes against the rules for consistency.” Etc etc. The 8 Golden Rules can be found the extra PDF reading in Week 3 on the Moodle website.  EXTERNAL REVIEWERS. Invite two other persons to review the nominated website. These participants can be your friends, family members or classmates etc. Include their comments in the report. Provide the background (i.e. age, gender, profession) of the participants. Do their views differ from yours’? State why or why not. You use the same set of questions you used on yourself with the other reviewers. For example, if you based your question on one of the 8 Golden rules, eg. consistency. The question may be “Are the navigational buttons on each page consistent with the other pages?” The question is first posed to yourself and then to the others. In this way, you have similar parameters and the same base foundation to work from and compare with. Otherwise if the questions are different, the outcome of your survey would not be as robust, as you would then have been comparing apples with oranges. I hope this makes sense.  RESULTS. This section is a tip on presenting your results. It is best if you could present your results as a graph comparing your results against the external reviewers. A picture is worth a 3 thousand words. However, to be able to graph your results you first need to be able to tabulate your findings. To do so, you commence your external reviews using a quantitative survey-like questionnaire. For example, “Please rank from 0-7.....” . Examples on these questionnaires can be found in the extra PDF reading in Week 3. Recommendation  Based upon your critique and observation in items (1) to (4) of the above, provide a recommendation on how the website should be improved. Conversely, if it does not require further improvement, then provide the reason why that this is the case. Your recommendations need to address the points you have drawn out and the discussion section above. Conclusion  A very short paragraph summarising your findings. Reference  Except for item (4) of the above, all assertions relating to HCI design principles (e.g. statements like ‘blue text on red background is a poor colour combination’ ) must be supported by references or critical observation. You can cite additional scholarly references other than the textbook. (Note: Do not use Wikipedia as a source of reference).