Lib website

River Campus library:

Layout:

I just noticed the library website has a very good layout and design:

Very nice colors 

Links on top stands out very well (white letters stand out very well with dark blue colors)

Very clean and simple layout 

Searching:

Very complex searching.

An average person would not know how to use it.

Weird implementation of boolean

Interface:

Navigation was easy as links stand out in main page

Tabs in the search make it easy to navigate

Every search looks and works differently so a user will have to learn how to use each

By Darly Paredes

HotWire.com (Parish)

The HotWire.com website has a very usable design, however the information is presented with very bad typography.

It was easy to select dates (i'm slowly begining to become a fan of the rich date-selection-calendar idiom), search type (flight, hotel, car, flight + hotel, flight+hotel+car, hotel+car) and orgin and destination locations (these selectors could both benefit from intermediate results). Picking "flexible" trip dates was rather less than intuitive and one area of usability which could use improvement.  

However, once a search was constructed, the information was returned sub-optimally. The possible flight options were presented to look somewhat similar to an airline boarding pass, I'm not convinced this is the best way to convey this information. Additionally, there was no way to sort by options other than price and number of stops. As the particular flight featured predominantly early departures, I would have been interested in seeing other flights which departed later in the day for a slightly higher price. Bi-handle selection sliders for time of arrival and departure would do much to ameliorate the issue.

Better typography with more whitespace and better presentation of data will increase usability.

Hotwire.com

Inputting my information was really easy. I loved the calender pop-up when I was choosing a date, and the auto complete while typing city names was really nice too!

However, if you input invalid information (like leaving the second date blank), the screen flashes and a bunch of prices/offers appears on right side of the website. I thought this meant they had found information, but I have no clue what the info was related to, because when I submitted valid information the entire website format changes (bad consistancy!). The new design was boring in colors and the information was far too cluttered, making it stressful to look at!

It seems like the home page is a lot more finished then their results from search page, which is kind of weak in comparison.

-Donato Borrello

Exercise 2: Interface Evaluation

At first glance, the HotWire.com website, while not exactly cutting-edge in terms of web design or overtly beautiful, appears usable. The "Rate Locator" pane is highlighted and very visible, and if I'm searching for a cheap airplane fare, I can do it immediately without much searching of the page. The icons for search type (the hotel bed, etc.) are helpful. Upon searching, the cheapest result is immediately presented, and the listing of airfares is presented appropriately. Navigation to other pages is simple and reasonably presented.

There isn't much contrast in terms of page elements, however, and the gray color of most page elements makes it difficult to determine what elements on the page are important. I think it would be good to design potential user observations around performing these basic tasks like searching for a flight, hotel room, etc., then perhaps mixing it up by adding a task such as filtering a flight search, adding more complex options, etc.

--
Wyatt Anderson
wanderson@gmail.com

Exercise 2: Interface Evaluation

The main purpose of the River Campus Libraries' website is to help students, staff, and faculty locate physical and digital resources including books, articles, videos, and journals. In the past, I have found this tool frustrating. First, the search often fails if you input a query in even a slightly different format than the format used in the resource's entry. Second, I have found a variety of annoying and confusing interface bugs. However, for the purpose of this blog entry I looked at the cite to see what tasks I might have my users do in a usability study.

Since, the whole point of this cite is to locate resource most of my task will probably ask the user to locate something using the system. Resources can be located by title, keyword, author, journal, call number, and a few others. I will probably have people locate a book using some of these different restricted searches. I would also like to give people different sets of information about a book and ask them to find it without telling them which search to use. Do they look it up by the title or the author?

I also want to explore tasks that begin once a book has been found. For example, how does the user find other books by the same author? Does the cite provide the flexibility to do things like this in an intuitive way?

Lastly, I would like to create tasks that test basic navigation. Can the user easily return to the homepage? Does the user understand where links should take him before he clicks.

Nate

Exercise 2 - Interface Evaluation (Garrett Hall)

The hardest tasks in the River Campus Libraries site are those which are hard to navigate to, such as "find the call number for all UR Botany dissertations."  The main navigation buttons are blue like the background so there is not enough contrast, but the alignment of items appears correct.  The breadcrumb link on the top and contact info on the bottom of the page is consistent throughout.  However, the navigation is not always what one would expect, for instance "Renewing Borrowed Materials" appears under "Requesting and Borrowing" as a breadcrumb, but both links are on the main page.  Overall the interface seems good, but could use improvement.

Hotwire Observation

When I first sat down to start using Hotwire, I found it reasonable
intuitive to select a city and date. However, after selecting these
specifics the site became more tedious to use. Because of the site's
business model (letting you select a hotel at random--only knowing a
rough location and the cost per night) I found it hard to
differentiate between my selections. Because there was no clear winner
in my mind, I got lost in the red and white of the interface. I
finally realized after 15 min that I was reading the same generalities
about a location that I did not actually intend to visit. Because of
the limited information about each location, choices that I make feel
even more superficial; I find myself always wanting the least
expensive option available.
-sid

Hotwire Evaluation (Barry)

The contrast of hotwire.com seems to be pretty good. I have no problems in finding and distinguishing of what is important and what is not. The repetition on the website also seems to be very good although it has different layouts for different things  like if you search for flights, cars, and hotels independently, they have the same design compared to when you do flight+hotel it will give you a different design. Perhaps this design can be the same? But I do think its not that bad.

The alignment can be improved so that the website looks more attractive and organised. The proximity for this website is hard for me to tell. It does not seem out of place to me. Its pretty easy to use and it even has a "change your search" menu at the left which I found very usefull. The only thing that bothered me is that when you look for flights + hotel, it will give you the price details under the total price which show me the price of hotels and flight if bought separately and what the discounts are if I bought them together. However, if I look at flights + hotel + cars, it just give me the total with no price details. So there is an inconsistency there. WIth just the total being stated, I am not sure if I get discount, paying full price or get ripped off without calculating the price myself.

Exercise 2 (Bin Bao)

From a software implementation perspective, library website is an interface to the underlying database. So it should provide common database functionality, including search, limited insertion and deletion (user side). Good searching interface is probably the top goal of the whole design. I need to come up with searching tasks, from simple to difficult. But I am not sure how difficulty a searching task usually is in a real usage. In other words, it may not be practical if we create a hard task.

Hotwire Evaluation

In all, I found hotwire.com a relatively easy-to-use intuitive system to simply get a deal, however there are some big issues that I noticed if you want to make the most out of it.  The biggest is that when you choose a package you lose a lot of the benefits of using hotwire.com in the first place, the ability to get the cheapest tickets because you do not know what you are getting when you book them.  Also, you are only given a choice of hotel and it somehow chooses a hotel and car rental for you, granted you can change this through different links but its not obvious you can do this and its hard to tell exactly which part of the trip is the most/least expensive.  Also, in order to make your dates flexible you have to click on an obscure link "planning tools" and then on the flexible planning, but that is only flights and there is no way to incorporate hotels or car rentals in that search.  Lastly, the amenity icons are slightly confusing and obscure and so you need to hover over them in order to understand what they are about.

James J Regan IV
COO Emeritus Consulting
B.S. Computer Science
B.A. Linguistics
University of Rochester
Class 2010