Monthly Archives: October 2003

Usability Review of My Lycos

Usability

Note: this usability review as done as part of my graduate coursework at Kent State University.

Usability

My Lycos is a substantial player in the portal/personal site market. The site is owned by Terra Lycos, which is currently seventh on the list of parent sites with the most visits (Nielsen//NetRatings, 1). The site offers a wide range of services, tools, and options, and allows users to log into accounts with other Terra Lycos sites like Tripod and Quote.com (My Lycos, 1). A previous paper (Newton, 1) examined the site and analyzed some user tasks. This paper will also re-analyze the tasks in the original paper, and take a second look at the site, through four usability guidelines from the textbook (Dumas, 56) and five from a popular usability site (Nielsen, 1).

1. Giving the user control

The original paper and a cursory examination of My Lycos show plenty of opportunity for users to take control. Users have 35 possible content boxes to choose from in eight categories. Some boxes can be further customized—the News box, for example, gives users the ability to pick up to 13 different types of news, rank them, and pick out local news sources. The main user control problem is the lack of a central place to change all settings or an easy walk through of the options available. It is likely many users miss that they can customize news, because the only indication is a small edit tag in the news box itself.

 

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Weekly listserv journal – Are bloggers important at all?

Blog, , , , ,

As part of a class project I’ve been reading the Online-News mailing list and responding to some of the issues and discussion brought up there.

More on blogs this week.  Online journalism seems to be obsessed with blogs anymore, which is annoying, because some really good IA discussions go on here otherwise.  Someone posted a study that provoked a ton of response:  “Perseus estimates there are 4.12 million blogs on eight hosting services.  But the research company estimated that 66% – 2.72 million – haven’t been updated in two months and that 1.09 million haven’t been updated since the first day. The average duration for an abandoned blog was 126 days, according to the survey of 3,634 blogs.”

http://www.mediapost.com/dtls_dsp_news.cfm?newsId=221430

None of this is too surprising, and some argued whether or not any bloggers are important at all.

Usability Review of My.Go2Net.com

Usability, , ,

Note: this usability review as done as part of my graduate coursework at Kent State University.

Usability Review of My.Go2Net.com

There is bound to be argument over what the primary, or first rule of usability is. But before any other rules or guidelines, a site must first satisfy the “zeroith” rule of usability: users must be able to get to the site. Go2Net fails this test because my.go2net.com is completely unavailable (Go2Net, 1). This is a problem first because competing sites already follow the my.[sitename].com URL convention (Welcome, 1). Worse, at one point my.go2net.com was a valid domain and had some amount of user recognition (Nasser, 1). This is especially bad for prospective portal sites, where the intention is that users will use the site as a launching point for the rest of the web. Anyone that had set their homepage to my.go2net.com has had to either update their homepage setting in their browser or pick a different site altogether. Portals need to seem stable and established–making major changes to a site’s navigation might counter that impression, but changing domain names around is even worse. Also, many users will only find Go2Net through links on other sites and pages. Although a Google search of sites linking to my.go2net.com comes up empty today (link:my.go2net.com, 1), Go2Net may have lost out on traffic from older links that have since been removed.

Additional usability rules are easy to find, but there is no authoritative list. This paper will consider four guidelines from the textbook (Dumas, 56) and five from a popular usability site (Nielsen, 1).

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