FHTW Berlin / Fachbereich 4 Internationale Medieninformatik MMA: Web Usability Sommersemester 2005 Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff

We are going to try our first exercise without much knowledge of how to do usability tests.

Choose your group today (4 persons), you will remain in this group all semester. Choose a name and a speaker, and mail the names and email addresses of everyone in the group, the team name (for example: UseIts) and designating a group speaker to Ms. Wagner, anwa@medeax.de and to me at weberwu@fhtw-berlin.de right now. No grades can be given for groups that have not registered!

Choose a company from the following list:

1. Assume that you are journalists writing an article about this company. Can you find the company site? Can you verify the spelling of the name of the president of the company? Can you find the name and the telephone number of someone in the PR department? How many employees does the company have? How much did they sell last year? What are their major products? Assuming your article is about some alleged environmental problem: do they have an environmental policy?

Don't just click around hoping to find something. Keep track of all the pages you had to visit to obtain this information (exact URLs!): What links did you follow? How deep in the hierarchy did you have to go? How many times did you have to backtrack? How long did you have to wait for pictures to download? Can you print the texts? What is your general feel about the site, is it easy to navigate? It might help to work in pairs, one person detailing the path and the other doing the clicking.

2. Now assume that you want a job with the company. Can you find specific job openings? Can you find a name and telephone number of someone with whom to talk? Does the company offer any special benefits? Detail as above.

3. If you have time, assume you are an investor. Can one purchase stock in the company? You want to check the return on investment for last year. Did the company pay shareholders a dividend? How much? Did the company acquire any other companies last year? Who are the major shareholders in the company? Can you find any of this information anywhere else? Detail as above.

Spend only the amount of time that we have in class on looking for the above information. Prepare a detailed, professional report. Submit it as a URL to your instructor by the begin of your next exercise.

If you are done early, try to imagine another target user of the site. What kinds of information could they be looking for? Detail a scenario as above and the search you had to do to find the information.