User Loyalty Articles

After the second version of the site was launched and promoted in forums, 27 people gave feedback. The main problem with the alpha site was that the design was inappropriate for the topic. The feedback from the second version of the site showed that this issue was solved. While in the feedback for the alpha site only five people said they liked the design, the beta site feedback had 12 people with positive comments about the design. Only one person said that he did not like the design.

In the feedback (refer to Appendix F), two issues were named by several people. Five people said that the home page needed a better structure and two people said that the length of the sentences decreased the readability. The problem with the readability was an obvious issue and was fixed immediately by limiting the text length of every sentence. A test , based on Dillon’s et al. (2001) testing methodology for aesthetics and usability, was conducted to determine how fast a home page with more structure could be scanned and what impact this version had on the impression participants got from the design of the site. Four versions of the home page were used to do that. The test was conducted on a computer and the six participants chosen were not regular users of the website and therefore had no routine in navigating the layout.

Every participant was tested separately. In the first step participants had to give a rating on the look of the home page in its original form and in the more structured form. Both versions that were used in this step had news in a different order than in the next step. The design was rated on a 10-point scale with 10 as the best. In the second step, two versions with different news were used. The participants had to find a certain word in the headlines of both versions while the time was clocked by the instructor who made a note of how long it took them to find the word and point to it. The word they had to find was at the same location in both versions. Every second participant received the two versions in reverse order to assure valid findings, because participants might compare the second version to the first when they rated the design or might have already some routine to scan the layout when they had to find the word in the second version of the second step.

The design of the structured version was rated 14.85% – worse than the design of the unstructured version – while it was only scanned 2.03% faster (refer to Appendix L). This result was expected even though the small difference in the time it took a participant to scan both versions were an unexpected finding. The minimal difference in time it took users to scan both versions would not justify a change of the site design and therefore a decrease of the aesthetic fidelity (Norman 2002), which is “the degree to which users feel the target impression intended by designers who developed the web pages” (Park et al. 2004).