ENG 598 Internship Week Two Deliverable Hazel Mynes

Annotated Bibliography Part 2

1. Lawrence, D., & Tavakol, S. (2006). Balanced website design: optimising aesthetics, usability and

purpose. Springer Science & Business Media.

This source, Balanced Website Design: Optimising Aesthetics, Usability and Purpose is a book

covering a new model of finding balance in website design. The authors discuss the use of Balanced

Website Design, which they refer to as BWD. The components of BWD, according to Lawrence,

(2006) are usability, purpose, and aesthetics. This article proposes BWD as a systematic way of

practicing "the art of good and effective website design" (Lawrence, 2006).

Below is a table from the resource, which the authors outline as the elements to add to

traditional methods of good web design. Table 1.1 below shows the features of BWD:

Table 1.1 Characteristic features of BWD

(Lawrence, 2006).

Notice the second from last bullet point in the table, which lays out a step to incorporate

additional features of usability with the traditional (Lawrence, 2006). It points out this element of

good web design, "An expansion on traditional usability considerations (to cater more clearly to all

types of websites" (Lawrence, 2006). This point got me curious as to how they would expand the
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topic of usability in this way. That curiosity took me to a section in the article that expounded on

what the authors call, "curved usability" (Lawrence, 2006). This term, coined by the authors, is used

to distinguish between more traditional applications of usability such as with business software and

information systems, and those that fall into other categories because of their genre association.

According to the authors, there is a big difference in the approach to usability when considering

"business-like, serious, corporate, and information resource type material and that of a more

esoteric nature (E.g., 'fun', artistic, thought provoking, cult, etc.)" (Lawrence, 2006).

Since I am making this information from this resource apply to the internship and project I

am completing in the redesign of Ms. Lightfoot's website, it is good to consider these ideas, as her

website is of a less serious, more creative and artistic nature. What these new ideas mean for her

website redesign is that I need to consider the type of website we are designing and the unique

needs of the audience. This is important so that the website is easy to use and so the clients can

easily navigate and find what they are looking for, but also have it presented in such a way that

meets the goals of the owner in presenting her art.

Table 1.2 below outlines some of the ways to perceive the needs of the audience and to

implement the fulfilling of those needs through curved usability, which is what I am working toward

in my redesign of lightfootgallery.com (Lawrence, 2006).

ENG 598 Internship Week Two Deliverable Hazel Mynes

Table 1.2 Straight and curved website usability guidelines

(Lawrence, 2006).
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2. Dingli, A., & Cassar, S. (2014). An intelligent framework for website usability. Advances in Human -

Computer Interaction, 2014 doi:10.1155/2014/479286

The journal article, An Intelligent Framework for Website Usability is touting another form of

usability standardization. However in this one, called Intelligent Usability Evaluation (IUE), the

authors discuss automating the evaluation process for usability of a website. The Heuristics of

usability are guidelines that have been developed over the years to help designers create and design

websites that are easy to use and that meet certain standards (Dingli, 2014).

This article seeks to set up objectives as an automated system, which will help web designers

to evaluate the usability of their sites. While this article lays out the principles that a good

evaluation tool would have (see Table 2.1 below), most tools previously set up to check for these

things have been too sophisticated for the average website (Dingli, 2014). The authors state, based

on research in the field, which they cite in the article, that an ideal evaluation tool should:

Table 2.1 Elements of an ideal evaluation tool for usability

Be located online and accessible as a web application

To mainstream the process of usability evaluation by targeting a larger audience and reduce
the costs associated with installations and logistics of local systems;

Fully automate the capture, analysis, and critique UE

Activities to be independent of human intervention;

Employ the Heuristic Evaluation technique for its ability of surfacing the majority of usability
problems encountered in a design through the inspection of a set of research-based website
usability guidelines

Collect and present evaluation results in the form of user-friendly reports to aid users gain
insight into the usability of their websites.

(Dingli, 2014).

Because of this lack of applicability of previous tools to most websites, the authors are

proposing a new IEU (Intelligent Usability Evaluation) tool, which they say, satisfies the imposed

requirements set forth in the table 1.1 above, but it minimizes the amount of human intervention
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necessary to evaluate a website for usability (Dingli, 2014). The new tool is an online Java web

application. The components of this IEU tool are set forth below in Table 2.2.

Table 2.2 Intelligent Usability Evaluation (IEU) tool features

The headings that are used should be unique from one another and conceptually related to the
content (HEADINGS G guideline);

The use of graphical text should be kept to a minimum (GRAPHICAL G guideline);

The homepage should look visually different from other webpages, whilst maintaining a consistent
look and feel throughout the website (HOMEPAGE G guideline).

(Dingli, 2014)

A main purpose of this new usability evaluation tool is to minimize the amount of human

intervention necessary (Dingli, 2014) When inspecting this article in more detail after learning this

information, I found the whole proposal to be too technical and that it would be prohibitive for me

to put the Intelligent Usability Evaluation (IEU) tool to use in my work with Lisa Lightfoot in

redesigning her website. The information was a bit helpful in that I feel more equipped to evaluate

manually based on some of the principles I learned in the article. I did some evaluation myself this

week of what I had built so far in the site, and made notes of areas to discuss with Lisa and to work

on updating, which I have already started. I will be doing some more evaluation work this week with

some users that I have selected to go to the site as is and give me some feedback. I will use some of

the elements of usability discussed in this article to guide me in that evaluation.

ENG 598 Internship Week Two Deliverable Hazel Mynes

Works Cited

Dingli, A., & Cassar, S. (2014). An intelligent framework for website usability. Advances in Human -

Computer Interaction, 2014 doi:10.1155/2014/479286

Lawrence, D., & Tavakol, S. (2006). Balanced website design: optimising aesthetics, usability and

purpose. Springer Science & Business Media.