Assignment Case Study (Social Media Analyst) You have been freelancing as a social media analyst for a number of years with projects ranging from simple “social” sites within Facebook to fully integrated social media strategies for large organisations (i.e. conducting large scale google analytics, server log analysis and full scale brand management for a website). As your portfolio grows you are getting more recommendations for work and your activity on Twitter and LinkedIn is helping. With this growing workload you need to update your own profile and web presence. As a starting point you need a new website which is responsive and adaptable across devices such as tablet, PC and home entertainment systems. This requires a detailed analysis of site designs and scalability, which will include competitors. Assignment Activities The assignment activities will be split into: exploratory research into responsive design and UX development; and, user testing. Exploratory Research and Development: Exploratory research is research that will help you identify improvements for future site designs. A recognised exploratory research method is Heuristic Evaluation (or expert review). We want you to apply heuristics as a mode of inquiry to support requirements gathering for a new site. This is a benchmarking activity and should be applied to three competitor websites. This activity will help you evaluate and identify new features based around: responsiveness; page design; and, information architecture (site mapping). This research will provide data and features to support the benchmarking exercise. So, using theories in usability we want you to: a. Apply the Heuristic framework. This framework will help you evaluate, compare and benchmark the websites. b. Gather data to compare and rank the features informing the research. c. Design a new UI using wireframes. The wireframes will present a new interface for the homepage and services page which are informed by the Heuristic analysis. d. Design a new site map which will present the overall architecture of the new website. User Test Plans and Testing: Testing is very important and will inform future decisions on website designs. The competitor testing will complement the heuristic analysis and is something that Rubin and Chisnell (2008) explain as “something that should be a continuous, checking that your site has a competitive edge” in the market to meet your users’ needs. To do this you need to make informed decisions about what to test and how to test. The test results will inform a new site design. The aim is to evaluate the usability and interactions with real users which are based around key objectives: • effective to use (effectiveness); • efficient to use (efficiency); • easy to learn (learnability); • easy to remember how to use (memorability). Assignment Deliverables: what needs to be submitted? The assessment deliverables consist of a test document with plans, recommendations and test recordings. To break this down further the assessment includes: 1. Expert Review – three Heuristic evaluations, these are frameworks which have been applied to competitor sites with suitable benchmarking data. 2. Design Documents – a set of wireframes and a site map presenting core features of the new site based upon these findings. 3. User Test Documentation - which will include an: • Overall goal - A high level description of what you are doing and why? This is the organisation viewpoint. • Research Questions - Listing the questions you specifically want to investigate which will support the overall goal, these needs to be clearly defined. • Method (test design) - How are you going to carry this out? Scheduled breakdown of what needs to be done on the day with the user. This will include a “Task list” which details tasks exploring the research questions. • Data to be collected and evaluation - Performance and preference measures described and analysed with evidence of graphs from Morae. • Recommendations - Measures proposed to improve the site with evidence from the evaluation. 4. User Testing: Using the test plan, you will need to run a series of tests with real users (please note, there are ethical issues when working with people and personal data and strict guidelines must be followed; these will be covered at length in class so please ensure you attend the relevant session). The tests should be conducted on a PC using the Morae recording software to capture the results. An analysis of the results will be required using Morae Manager. The analysis will form the basis of your recommendations, noting problems and areas for future consideration. Four tests will be by real users’ interacting with your chose competitors, testing against key objectives: • effective to use (effectiveness); • efficient to use (efficiency); • easy to learn (learnability); • easy to remember how to use (memorability). A set of graphs and charts should be produced using Morae. These graphs aim to show users’ performance within the tests i.e. time taken to complete tasks, number of errors made, problems encountered etc. Expected report size and format: you should ensure you adopt a professional reporting structure with title page, table of contents, main body, appendices and page numbers etc. Excluding title page, table of contents and appendices, your documentation for the assessment is expected to be approximately 10 pages in length using size 11 or 12 standard font (i.e. Calibri, Arial, Tahoma, and Verdana etc). You should adopt a formal reporting style with use of third person only, professional language, correct grammar and spelling.