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Memorandum
To: Dr. Kenneth Price
From: ENGL 312 Student
Date: 14 December 2004
Subject: Website Evaluation
Overview
This memo is a critical evaluation of a website titled “Alaskan Mystical One.” You can visit the website at http://www.akmystic1.com. I will critique this website based on the following usability attributes:
- Rhetorical effectiveness
- Audience needs assessment
- Ethos (broken links and graphics)
- Screen design
- Navigation
- Labeling
- Figure-ground contrast
- Noise
- Organization
- Grouping techniques
- Cohesion
- Graphic format appropriateness
- Visual hierarchy
- Readability
- Style
- Ease of use
Rhetorical Effectiveness
Rhetorical effectiveness is a very important part of any good website. This website has an unclear audience and purpose. Everything from the title of the website, “Welcome to Alaskas Mystic One Home Page,” to labels on links and buttons seem to have been written with no purpose or audience in mind.
To improve the rhetorical effectiveness of this website, I would suggest the author at least make the following changes:
- Remove noisy and distracting elements, including confusing or unnecessary images and animations
- Label links to be descriptive of their destination
- Remove entry-less guest book, short story page, and other unused pages
- Change all page titles to be consistent and effective
- Add a statement to describe the purpose and target audience of the web site
Audience Needs
The audience for the Alaskan Mystic One website is unclear. The title of the page is also unclear. The web address is www.akmystic1.com. The title of the first page is “Alaskan Mystical One HomePage”. There is a disturbing image of a flaming skull wearing a crown of thorns with blood coming out of its mouth. The words “outland domain” are displayed in a novelty font on this image. If that wasn’t confusing enough, there is an advertisement for “The Power of 2.” Apparently sponsored by the Salvation Army and KTUU, the user can click this link to volunteer to be a bell ringer in Anchorage. The remaining links on the page are also ambiguous:
- Homepage – This link takes you to the “first page” of this website. The user can also access the same URL by clicking on the skull image. The homepage introduces the website, but does not suggest that it serves any target audience.
- Flea market – This link takes the user to some kind of online auction site. No one apparently uses this, because the counter at the bottom of the page states in italics, “There have been 133 visitors to this site”.
- Students – Apparently the author teaches a class called “Server Operating Systems” at the University of Alaska Anchorage Community and Technical College. This link takes the user to a page dedicated to this class.
- Hockey – This link takes the user to a page for the Black Knights children’s Hockey team.
- Scouting – This link takes the user to a page for Pack 84 of the Cub Scouts.
- Services – This link takes the user to a page where the author advertises his web hosting services.
The author has grouped many unrelated pages together. For example, the hockey page is completely unrelated to the “Server Operating Systems” page. The author needs to create a profile for each group that uses his web page. The author needs to structure the website to make navigation simple and clear to any user. I see three important user groups for this website:
- The author’s students
- The author’s hockey team
- The author’s cub scout pack
The “mosquito market” seems to be totally unused, and could be eliminated. The “Services” page could be turned into a PDF file, and made available to users by request.
Style
The author does not use correct presentational writing style in this website. He fails to focus on the reader. The purpose of his writing is unclear. It fails to inform, instruct, or persuade. His writing is argumentative, and elaborative. The structure is unpredictable and unorganized. There are no summaries, overviews, or conclusions. Information is presented in a seemingly unordered manner. He uses no hierarchy of any kind.
Some paragraphs, like the first under “home page,” are too long. Others, like the one about his violin playing, are too short.
The author should correct the writing in his website to conform to the criticisms I mentioned above. It would also help to conform to the schema theory:
- Have no more than seven elements per list
- Consistently use headings, subheadings, headers, and footers
- Organize information hierarchically
- Show organization through levels of headings, listing, changes in typography, and placement on the page
- Write introductions, overviews, and summaries
- Write periodic sentences: new, difficult, and important information should appear near the ends of sentences.
The information mapping principle suggests that readers can handle about 4-9 new elements at a time, and to “chunk” information into readable portions that follow this size guideline. Blocks of text, paragraphs, and pages should be no more than 7 sentences or elements, give or take 2.
Readability
The “cub scouts” page is particularly difficult to read. It was very difficult for me to determine what each link was pointing to in the long bulleted lists under the “Forms Area” heading. Links should be high contrast. Text should be high contrast. Common styles and formatting should be applied to the entire site. I’d recommend the author stick to at most three heading levels, with a single body text color and size. I’d also recommend the author remove all background images, and change the color scheme to use high-contrast colors, like black text on a white background.
The author needs to correct the technical writing style problems from his pages:
- passive voice
- nominalizations
- stacked nouns
- expletive constructions
- pronoun reference
- faulty parallelism
Information in online documentation should be presented in short self-contained topics. These topics should be readable in any order, and should be independent of any beginning, middle, or end. Organization should be obvious, in sequence or hierarchy.
In presentational writing, authors should try to minimize elaboration. One effective method is to use bulleted lists. In electronic documents, lists should have no more than five elements.
Ethos
All links should be clearly labeled. Users should understand where links they click will take them. At the homepage, users can click on the hyperlink labeled “Boys and Girls club here in Anchorage” to visit the website for the Boys and Girls Clubs in Anchorage. There is another image located in another page that is difficult to read, but seems to say “recreational soccer” on it. Clicking this image will take the user to the same Boys and Girls Clubs page, but opens up the link inside the containing HTML frame. This is unexpected behavior that should be eliminated. Images in the website should not have an unnecessarily large file size. Very long download times interrupt the usability of the website. The link buttons on the front page are supposed to give the user visual feedback when the mouse hovers over them, but they took about forty seconds to download on my high speed Internet connection at home.
This site has elements that seem to be completely unrelated to any other element in the site. For instance, there is a link labeled “So you think you’re a writer?” in the middle of the page. This link takes the user to a page where they can input some text, and submit it. No one has submitted anything. These extraneous elements should be removed.
Navigation
The user could easily become lost in this web site. There is never any indication of the user’s current location relative to any other location. Once the user clicks on “homepage” or “outland domain,” the user is taken to a page that has a navigation area on the left side of the page. This navigation area has one additional button that doesn’t appear on the “welcome” page, labeled “Web Image.” This link takes the user to an external site also created by the author.
The navigational scheme should be totally consistent across all web pages. The navigation area differs from page to page. It appears on the left on the home page, and on the top on the cub scouts and hockey pages. The author could improve navigability by adding a breadcrumb trail, and making the navigational area appear identically, and in the same location on every page.
Noise
Virtually every visual on this site is noisy. The author should remove the offending visuals, and replace them with improved graphics that are clear, have appropriate contrast, color, style, and layout. He should only place graphics on the page where they will be effective, and serve the purpose of the document.
Ease of use
This website is not easy to use. There are too many text blocks per page, the language is unclear, and there is no apparent goal or target audience. The graphics are difficult to comprehend, the color scheme is garish, the layout follows no order or hierarchy, and some pages (like those within the “student” section) seem to be buried deep within the navigational structure. The rhetoric is ineffective, and style is noisy, inconsistent and confusing. Interactive components of the website are inconsistent, and unpredictable. Forms like the “short story” or “mosquito market” pages serve no purpose and should be removed.
Conclusion
The Alaska Mystic One web site has many problems. It would benefit from being redesigned. The first issue would be to separate the various unrelated topics, and place them in an ordered structure. A presentational document shouldn’t exist unless it serves a purpose and audience. The web site needs to cater to specific users. The author needs to define an audience, and write for that audience. By conforming to the criticism I’ve written in this memorandum, the design of the website can be improved substantially. If you have any questions, please send a message to me via e-mail. Write to engl312student@gmail.com. Thank you for your time.
