HW DUE IN 20 HOURS

PLEASE READ THE INSTRUCTIONS 

pick any company ( CHANEL) on the web that is not discussed in your textbook, Homepage Usability – 50 Websites Deconstructed, and referring to the

Recommended Homepage Design

table in the reading from that book, write an analysis of how well your chosen site meets the criteria listed.

Through this exercise, demonstrate your comprehension and appreciation of the factors that are important to good site construction. Your analysis will demonstrate your comprehension of the technical and usability issues involved. Your write up should include:

· Screen shots marked, numbered, and correlated to their analysis statements.

· Statements explaining the superiority or inferiority of the site as it relates to each of the 20 points.

Prepare a paper (750 -1,000 words) discussing how the technical and usability of site would be improved and why. The assignment must be completed in Microsoft Word and all sources should be sourced in MLA format. The word count does not include the cover page or the bibliography.

RECOMMENDED HOMEPAGE DESIGN

Link Formatting

Next to the use of colored text, the underline is the second-most important cue to users that text is clickable, and 80% of the homepages underlined the links. We continue to recommend that links be underlined, except possibly in navigation bars that use a design that makes it more than commonly obvious where users can click.

Of the homepages in our sample, 60% used the traditional standard for link colors: blue. This is a fairly small majority, but still large enough that we continue to recommend blue as the color for unvisited links. If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.

Only 12% of sites used black links. This is less recommended, except for cases where one deliberately wants to downplay the links. In general, people look for colored text when trying to find out what they can do on a page.

In our study, 74% of the homepages changed the color on links leading to pages that the user had already visited. We highly recommend changing the color on visited links because this is one of the primary ways users understand where they have been on the site and also a helpful way to avoid having them go repeatedly to the same place by mistake.

Of those sites that used a different color for visited links, 54% made the visited links purple. Light blue and gray were the runner-ups with 16% and 11%, respectively. Most sites used some form of lighter or less saturated color for their visited links than for the unvisited links that lead to places where the user had not been yet.

Recommended Homepage Design

The following table shows our recommendations for the values you should choose for your homepage for each of the criteria discussed in this chapter. The recommendations are based on two considerations:

· What user testing has shown to work best with the way people behave online.

· What this chapter has shown to be the prevalent design decisions on other homepages.

One of the main findings from many usability studies is that sites work best when they follow the conventions users know from other sites. So the more sites do things a certain way, the more usability will usually increase by complying with that convention. Even when a convention may be suboptimal from a theoretical perspective, in practice it will work well because users will know how it works.

Each of the recommendations is annotated with a star rating to indicate how critical this guideline is to a satisfactory user experience:

· Essential Recommendation: Should be followed by virtually all projects; violate only if you have test data to prove something different works better for your specific circumstances.

· Strong Recommendation: Should be followed by most projects; deviate only if you have a good reason to believe your site has different needs.

· Default Recommendation: Safe default to follow, unless you can think of something better.

Link Formatting
Next to the use of colored text, the underline is the second-most important cue to users that text is clickable, and 80% of the homepages underlined the links. We continue to recommend that links be underlined, except possibly in navigation bars that use a design that makes it more than commonly obvious where users can click.
Of the homepages in our sample, 60% used the traditional standard for link colors: blue. This is a fairly small majority, but still large enough that we continue to recommend blue as the color for unvisited links. If links are blue, users know what to do. End of story.
Only 12% of sites used black links. This is less recommended, except for cases where one deliberately wants to downplay the links. In general, people look for colored text when trying to find out what they can do on a page.
In our study, 74% of the homepages changed the color on links leading to pages that the user had already visited. We highly recommend changing the color on visited links because this is one of the primary ways users understand where they have been on the site and also a helpful way to avoid having them go repeatedly to the same place by mistake.
Of those sites that used a different color for visited links, 54% made the visited links purple. Light blue and gray were the runner-ups with 16% and 11%, respectively. Most sites used some form of lighter or less saturated color for their visited links than for the unvisited links that lead to places where the user had not been yet.
Recommended Homepage Design
The following table shows our recommendations for the values you should choose for your homepage for each of the criteria discussed in this chapter. The recommendations are based on two considerations:
· What user testing has shown to work best with the way people behave online.
· What this chapter has shown to be the prevalent design decisions on other homepages.
One of the main findings from many usability studies is that sites work best when they follow the conventions users know from other sites. So the more sites do things a certain way, the more usability will usually increase by complying with that convention. Even when a convention may be suboptimal from a theoretical perspective, in practice it will work well because users will know how it works.
Each of the recommendations is annotated with a star rating to indicate how critical this guideline is to a satisfactory user experience:
· Essential Recommendation: Should be followed by virtually all projects; violate only if you have test data to prove something different works better for your specific circumstances.
· Strong Recommendation: Should be followed by most projects; deviate only if you have a good reason to believe your site has different needs.
· Default Recommendation: Safe default to follow, unless you can think of something better.

· THIS IS THE CHART YOU NEED TO FOLLOW