Thursday, April 18, 2002

Evaluating websites

Objective: Later in the semester you will be designing a website as part of a
collaborative project.  In order to develop criteria and methods for
evaluating websites, we'll visit several locations and discuss how useful and reliable they are.

Go to
http://php.louisville.edu/a-s/english/chat/ and log into the open forum chat
room.  You can use any user name you feel comfortable with.  We will
use the chat space primarily to share information, especially URLs for websites.

Open a new, different browser window. (usually you can type control-n from
within netscape or internet explorer).  Divide into groups of three and
visit the following websites, one at a time.  Take notes in a word
processor, email note, or web page about each site.  Although we will be
building a list of questions and criteria for evaluating websites in class, we
don't need to start entirely from scratch.  Here are a few questions to get
you started.

• Who is the audience for this site?


• What is its purpose?


• Is this site trying to persuade you of anything?


• What are the underlying themes, values, or ideas expressed by this
  website?


• How is this site different from a booklet or pamphlet?  How is it the
  same?


• How easy or difficult is it to use?  Explain.

You should be adding to this list with your own questions. At the end of class you will email me your list of evalutation questions with the name of each group member attached. Mark Crane

Sample sites

•  


• http://www.louisville.edu/provost/undergrad/elp/


• 
  http://www.geneva.com/


• http://www.scorecard.org


• 
  http://www.beefnutrition.org/


• 
  http://www.dhmo.org/Criteria
  
  
  
  Bonus round:

Select one member of your group to come to the front of the class and share
one of their favorite websites.  They should tell us why it is their
favorite, why they use the site, and briefly discuss usability.

Evaluation Grid (work in progress)

"Ideally, usability tests for documents occur in a setting
that simulates the actual situation, with people who will actually use the
document" (Lannon 336)

Rhetorical	Functional	Usability	Yet to be named
audience purpose claims authority	complete current working links load time	locate understand use information	Visual Ethical Stickiness Underpinnings

 

Sources I used to build this assignment::

• 
  http://www.louisville.edu/infoliteracy/evaluate.htm (U. of Louisville
  infoliteracy pages)


• 
  http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/web-eval-sites.htm (Virginia Montecino)


• 
  http://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/webcritique.htm (Virginia Montecino)


• http://www.useit.com (Jakob Nielsen)


• Lannon, John. Technical Communication. 8th ed.

Super Bonus Round:

If we have time at the end of class, we'll play around with http://www.blogger.com , a collaborative publishing tool.