Critical appraisal

Critical appraisal
The aim of this report is to critically evaluate the stages for building the commercial purpose used website and discuss the three important issues which are usability accessibility and interface design as well as critically appraise the finished website and how well it meets the intended brief and matched the original design.
In the beginning stage of designing the website, the business scenario is highly considered, because that’s have a strong influence on what the site content and layout will be. The task is about building an e-commerce web site which sells books on line. According to the scenario, the wireframe is initially designed which are shown below:
The reason for putting forward this type of design is fully considered and evaluated according to the scenario and most importantly refers to the web usability and accessibility. All the information on the main frame of the website are compacted but displayed aligned and with reasonable space. The header section contains the logo image and the title of the web site as well as login section. The search sector helps people to find the books they need that is in the website. Horizontal navigation design as main web site navigation is used for navigating all different pages contained in the website. The reason for designing that to be the main navigation is because it is easy and eases for user to use for navigating in the site. The shape of the vertical Navigation part contains all the book categories are designed be considerable height rectangle. The reason for placing all the book categories on the left hand side is
because it has a larger area to sufficiently include as more book menus as it can. And the most importantly, its scroll down feature, the user will take less time to go through all the categories and find the category they look for.
The next stage is to consider how much pages the website should contain. The results will directly decide how much associated button needed for the horizontal navigation. To pages are related to different functions that the webpage should contain. There are two essential parts which the website must include which are home page and contact us page. There are another two pages are still needed required from the user requirement which are pages that display all the books in the right format and pages that contains input forms to add customers’ details. Critically analyze this, the book navigation button should be replaced as about us button instead to introduce what is the site about and offer useful site information. The content of the Account page shouldn’t contain customer transaction details and should be replaced as customer registration page instead. the reason why those two content are not generated is because for this 10 percent module course work, content design following the requirements is more important than creating some other unnecessary section which is also require a lot more extra work to be carried out. Another drawback for the website is that a lot of the functions are disabled for avoiding extra work which is irrelevant to the specified requirement. The wireframe design for stage two are shown below:
The third stage is to deign the content of each section in the main page. The content in home page is books special offers for the New Year. In this page, the book layout
could be design neater and more precisely aligned. For the contact us page, the content of the form could have be added more information and our address could be display in a better format.
As part of the assignment, it is important to know the issues about usability and web accessibility. The website usability comprise of learn ability, efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction. Learn ability represents how easy the user can accomplish at the first time. Efficiency represents the speed that the task can be performed. Memorability represents how easier the user can construct the proficiency. Errors represent how many error the user could make, the degree of errors as well as how easy the user can recover from the errors. Satisfaction represents how pleased it is to use the design. A good website with good usability features should have a simplified architecture, use a consistent naming convention and limit the clicking. (Eccher 2008) The definition of the web accessibility is“people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Web accessibility also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.” (W3C 2010) In the designed book website, the color contrast and using tab index access key are mainly focused on. The foreground and background color combinations providing sufficient contract are always ensure across anywhere in the web page. Back and white color for fonts is mainly used especially for people who have color blindness problems. The code below is part of the codes in the design to fulfill the goals of providing web accessibility.
<tr><td>Username:</td>
<td><input type="text" size="10" name="username"
tabindex="1"/></td>
<td style="color:#fff">Password:</td>
<td><input type="password" size="10" name="passwd"
accesskey="a"/></td></tr>
Overall, the finished website are achieve better than the intended brief planed, CSS are widely used to enhance the usability design of the website, especially the design of the layout. As a whole, the final products perfectly match the origin design.
However, the web usability and accessibility need more improvement as long as standard XHTML coding.
Reference
Eccher. C, 2008 professional web design. Course technology: Boston
W3C, 2010. Introduction to web accessibility [online] available at:<
/WAI/intro/accessibility.php> [Accessed 9 January 2010].。