I am confident that the design our group made for a better Oncourse will be generally accepted as a vast improvement to the piece of crap that is there now. We put quite a bit of thought into it. The ultimate goal of every design is maximum efficiency and usability, and my question for our design is the following: Is our prototype of Oncourse designed so that the user says to him or herself ‘Wow, this is much better.’
Not everybody is going to agree that any particular design is the best, and that’s okay as long as it meets the goals of the user. For Oncourse, the user wants to find information quickly and easily. Nobody is going to want to use Oncourse, but if our design can get a user to find the information without having a sense of accomplishment while doing it then we know it’s good. This system should be like “Yeah, so what?” when a user wants to find something.
We used two different methods in our design to make the Oncourse experience fail-proof. We have blatantly obvious buttons in the middle of the page that are clearly labeled with places the user will go. We also have the tree structure in the background on the left side. If the user feels more comfortable using that then more power to him or her, and if for some farfetched reason he or she cannot find the information through the main part of the page then the tree is always there as a backup. Both of these methods are quicker, easier, less confusing, and better than what Oncourse has now.
To ensure that our group achieves the result we desire, our user testing simply uses detailed observation of the user. All we have to do is watch and see how much trouble the user has, how long it takes him or her to find the information, and most importantly listen for that sigh of frustration. That sign of frustration is what we all let out when logging into Oncourse. If we can eliminate that and let the user accomplish the task feeling like he or she did something completely easy then we will have succeeded. I am confident that our design does that.
