Executive Summary:
The first thing that comes to mind when viewing the Mount Kisco webpage is “Woah.” The site is a total disaster that needs some serious remodeling. This usability test will be conducted on the webpage for the Town of Mount Kisco. Users who will be partaking in the test will go to the site and try and properly navigate to find how to sign up for the EZ pay for their water bill. The current website is very difficult to read and navigate due to fonts, colors, and menus which makes it unclear for users who are visiting the site to find basic information about the town. Currently, the town website has many errors and problems that make it difficult for a regular person to operate.
Introduction:
The website chosen for this usability project is a small town of Mount Kisco’s website www.mountkisco.org. The website is about The Village of Mount Kisco, but it is poorly designed and hard to find the information you are looking for. The pictures on the page are all distorted, the menu font is unclear, and the overall usability of the site is poor. There is just way too much going on on the home page, making it difficult for a user to find the information they are looking for. For someone who is unfamiliar with technology and is trying to locate how to pay their water bill, they will find that it is an extremely difficult time to do so. The 5 Heuristics would be Flexibility, Aesthetic, Error Prevention, User Freedom, Help and documentation. Many things need to be fixed to make this site easier to navigate. The users of the usability test will need to properly navigate the site.
Inspection/Description:
The website of the village Mount Kisco in Westchester, New York includes several interface elements. Among these includes: input controls, navigational components, informational components, and containers. The main menu is a basic setup. There is an image of the Mount Kisco Courthouse at the top of the page with the town’s crest to the left. The colors used on the site consist of blue, white, and a yellowish gold. In the middle of the page there is a slideshow of the villages attractions, as well as a friendly greeting from the Mayor, J. Michael Cindrich. On the right side of the page there is a section that includes the daily news and announcements. On the left side of the page there is a menu bar that when clicked on, a dropdown list shows up allowing the user to go to a more specified section. In the bottom right section of the main menu there is a calendar of the current month’s events and meetings. The user has the option to select one of the dates. This option is called a “date and time picker”. A date picker allows users to select a date and/or time. By using the picker, the information is consistently formatted and input into the system. In the top right section of the main menu there is a search box field. The search box allows the user to navigate throughout the site efficiently and easily by simply typing in a relative word.
Findings:
The site is showing many different alerts and features, but not so many errors. There are very low contrast errors that are present on The Village of Mount Kisco site. The contrast tool shows that the colors used on the site are blue and white. There is a broken skip link on the site on the home page right about the village crest. The target for the link does not exist or the link is not keyboard accessible. I see that there are 12 broken same page links alerts, 27 device dependent event handler alerts, 66 Tabindex alerts, and 37 very small text. I think that if some of these were fixed the webpage would be much easier to work with and the viewer would have a much easier time finding exactly what they needed. The usability of this site needs to be fixed there should not be that many alerts, especially for a government website. Normal and Large text passed and the contrast ratio is 8.57. The text that has been chosen for the site is hard to read especially if you have bad vision. The clarity is very poor. The colors and fonts make this site much harder to read as well as the fonts. The blue background with the blue and white writing makes it difficult for the viewer to find what they are looking for. Also, there is a flashing red announcement sign that could give the user anxiety and it makes the page more clustered. The images that are showing on the home page are totally skewed and are moving way too fast for anyone to even get to view them. The images are pictures of the towns park, police station, 9/11 memorial, and the town square. Although the images are important to show on the site, many of the pictures are unclear and uploaded in the not so best quality. The images are also moving too fast for a viewer to actually get a good look. Also, the two menu bars are completely unnecessary. They can be combined into one single bar either running along the top of the page or down the left side.
For the 5 Heuristics they are Flexibility and efficiency of use, Aesthetic and minimalist design, Error Prevention, User control and Freedom, Help and documentation. For the flexibility and efficiency of use, currently the website does not cater to inexperienced users and that needs to be adjusted due to the fact that it is merely just too complicated to navigate the site for someone who is not familiar with technology. The aesthetic and minimalist design, the site’s home page contains information that is not needed. All that is doing is making the page seem more “busy” than it really needs to be. Many menus and tabs can be combined to reduce the busy feeling. Error prevention on the site completely lacks. The user control and freedom in non-existent. It does not give you an option to simply just get out of the unwanted page. Help and documentation is poor. Finding information is extremely difficult on the site.
Usability Test Plan:
For the Usability test plan, a user will need to proper navigate the site. The user must figure out how to find the forum to sign themselves up for EZ PAY for their water/sewage bill. Participants will be residents of the town of Mount Kisco who will be different ages that will be varying from people in their 40s to 70s. Letters asking for their participation will be dropped into random mailboxes throughout the town requesting that we have 10 males and 10 females conduct the usability test for a total of 20 different participants. Each individual will be given verbal instructions by an instructor who will help them get through the test. The users will sit at 20 different computers that will be monitored by a program that can record each move. There will be a timer that begins at the start and will shut off after the user completes the task. After completion, the results will be examined to see how much time each person took and look at the age group of each users to compare the results.
Proposed Redesign:
The Mount Kisco Village webpage needed to be redesigned. There are many things that could be fixed that will make it easier for the user to navigate the site. First and foremost, the colors on the page don’t work. There is entirely too much blue used on the page, which makes it difficult to actually see the menu titles that run along the left side of the page as well as the top. The basic small thin font that is used should be changed to something bolder and easier for the reader. On the topic of menus, there does not need to be two menu bars. The two should be able to be combined into one because it just makes the page seem more clustered than it needs to be. There is just so much writing and images that are moving on the page, it makes the viewer confused. With this being a town website, many people would be trying to log on to see when there are board meetings that can be attended and the way to view that is currently in a small calendar on the bottom right corner. The calendar should be larger and easier to navigate rather than being small and placed in the corner of the site. The calendar with important dates can be located in the middle of the page. This goes along with News & announcements. These should be bold and in larger font so it makes it more simple for the user to find the information needed. News and Announcements should be combined with the tab “News and Emergency Emergency Alert Sign up. It does not make sense why News and Emergency alert sign up are in the same menu tab because they having absolutely nothing to do with one another. Emergency alert sign up should be in the same tab as emergency services. Another thing is there are two different sections that say “important.” One is the important information section on the bottom of the page, the next is the Important links tab on the left side menu bar. These can be combine into one. There are just so many menus along the top and the left side of the page it makes it hard for the user to find exactly what they are looking for. They also all repeat themselves and it is very redundant. Many of the menu tabs are pointless and not useful. So much information is scattered throughout the home page that could be organized much better. Examples include combining the upcoming meetings calendar with the agendas and minutes menu tab of the left side of the page. On the very top of the page there is the town crest along with a picture of village hall and the town library. These two images are divided where they should be implemented into one another. Something else that is a bit confusing that should be changed is the mayors short paragraph on the home page. That is a very important statement from the town mayor and the viewer’s attention should be immediately draw to it rather than all the other nonsense. Making that font larger and bolder will attract the eye to it. The moving images also takes the attention away from the mayor’s message, so taking away the pictures would also calm down the page and move them away from the paragraph.
