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Literature Review Summary:

What are past blog entries telling you? What do we need to solve our problem?

So far our end users have told us that they have difficulty allocating information that they desire in our “company’s” website. They also have expressed that they spend too much time trying to find the information, therefore causing dissatisfaction with the company and their web services.  As a result many of our end users customers use third company websites to purchase their tickets and vacation packages. What the end users may not realize with these third party company websites is that they may charge additional fees and surcharges. Also sometimes the actual company’s website offers better deals.

Based on our literature reviews as well as comparison of the top three airlines websites, we have discovered very useful information to perhaps transform our company’s website.
  • Less is more: Simplifying menus and contents are a must when developing a website.  It takes about 0.1 seconds to grab end users interest. It takes approximately 10 seconds to realize if there are problems with a website. Simplifying contents allows us to minimize end users’ cognitive load.  For example, the websites that we reviewed placed 4 to 5 menus and within those menus they also embedded approximately 4 to 5 sub menus. Studies have indicated that individuals can store approximately 4 visual objects in their working memory, and individual’s performance will decline if the visual objects exceed these amounts.
  • Organization: Information needs to be nested under a specific domain and heading. We need to structure information so that contents are streamlined throughout the website. Streamlining can be established by mimicking how the human brain process information. Approximately 80% of time, individuals process information through visual stimuli. They transfer information to working memory and to the long-term memory. Appropriate organization and reconstruction allow end users to come back to the website and allocate information quickly. That is, the end users can recall how they found the information from their long-term memory, i.e. their previous experiences with a well designed website.
  • Take account of end user’s learnability: a novice user will not always be a novice user. They will gradually become an expert user as they learn the interface and learn to how to navigate through practice. We must identify the end users and their skillsets.
  • Visual Stimuli: Stimuli should be integrated in the website to guide the end users to find the information. Flashing buttons, bright colors and fast paced animation sometimes interfere with tasks. The web designer and web developers need to control and provide adequate visual stimuli so that it can quickly guide end users to relevant information.

These are some of the information that we were able to retrieve just based on comparison analysis and literature reviews. This information is sufficient, yet a lot for designers and developers to tackle so improvements can be made on our company’s website. For my next entry I will be introducing the methodology to enhance end users time spend finding information and content structure. But as a researcher, I would like to recommend that we should start small. Tackling small issue, one at a time. My Ph.D advisor always told me, you are not here to solve a world problem.  Since we are all experienced professionals, we have the ability to apply solutions to bigger issues that lie ahead.

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