Gameology - Australia's Largest Gaming Warehouse

Positive and Negative Aspects of Gameology

Discuss about the Human Computer Interaction and Website.

The website or popular as site is a central location of several webpages that are all connected to each other. The site has navigation through all the pages can be visited. Every website must have a home page which entails the purpose of the site. Each of the site has URL through which the website is accessed (Lazar, Feng and Hochheiser 2017). The URL of different website is different. In today’s world, the website needs to be responsive. The use of the mobile devices are increasing and has become the most used device in present day. However, the qualities that needs to be included within a website is similar in booth laptop and mobile view of website. The selected website is gameology. This website will be reviewed and the main focus would be human computer interaction of the site.

Gameoloy is the biggest gaming warehouse of Australia. The warehouse of the organization is situated in Melbourne. This warehouse has largest collection trading card games, board games and similar products. Irrespective of the genre, the organization always provide the best games to the customers. This organization provide online platforms to the customers. The customers from Australia, New Zealand and other countries are using this online platform to buy product in much lesser price in comparison with any other enterprise. The main motto of the organization is to provide the best services to the customers. The organization has its headquarter at 12 Eileen Rd, Clayton South 3169, Australia. The user can shop by Board Games, TCG, Toys & Collectables, games accessories, Pre-Orders, Sale and Gifts & Merchandise. The organization accepts pre orders from the customers. The customers can also contact with the representatives of the organization through phone, email or social media. Gameoloy also sells wallets, necklaces, key rings and many more products. The promotional activities of a product is nicely done by the marketing department of the organization. The biggest advantage of the organization is that it provides a variety of gaming products to the customers in the cheapest rate (Gameology 2018).

There are four main features that has been identified. These features are as following.

1. Presentation of Crucial Information: Throughout the site, the presence of the important information can be found. The information has been shown in every place where possible (Karsai et al. 2014). The organization has used text as minimum as possible so that people can skim the writing things.
2. Contact Information: The organization has used a different page or section. The website has provided the contact information in the header section. If the customer clicks on the contact number then an option in the browser will open to choose an app to make the call (Britto and Pizzolato 2016). This is really a great way to provide support to the customer.
3. Clear Navigation: The navigation of the website is very simple and powerful. The customer can click on the menu links to open the page with related products. The customer can navigate through the page and directly buy a product without any hassle.
4. Social Media Integration: The website has provided links to the social media. The user can contact the repressive of Gameoloy through social media sites (Kosinski et al. 2015).

The positive aspects of Gameoloy are as following.

1. Content: The content is the substance of the website along side with style. The purpose of the content is providing enough information to the users so that they can take decisions. The content that has been used within the website is informative along with relevant (Ostlund and Svensson 2015). The contents are short but present in organized manner.
2. Functionality: It is essential that each of the entities present in the website should be efficient and effective in its function. The website does not have any broken or not working component (Johnson et al. 2015). The hyper-links, site search, navigation, forms and other components of the site works in a fine manner.

• Simplicity: The presence of the website is very simple. Any information can be accessed very easily because of the great navigation. The site has followed all the conventional rules and guidelines of website building.

The negative aspects of Gameoloy are as following.

1. Appearance: The site may look visually appealing at first look but if a user spend hours on the view toward the site’s appearance may not be same (Eveland Jr and Dunwoody 2016). The color combination that has been used does not reflect the organization at all.
2. Color Combination: The color combination that has been used in the website is very poor quality.

Review from First Participant: The first participant is my social media friend. He is 26 years old. He is currently working as an assistant bank manager in a private bank in Sydney. He has accessed the website in laptop. He has liked the appearance of the website as the both the black and red colors are his favorite. He has navigated through the website and found that searching product is very easy in this site. He liked that the site has provided enough information about everything that he did not have any issue understanding any aspect of the site. He liked the presence of vast amount of products on the website and the exiting offers that are available for most of the products.

Reviews from Participants

Review from Second Participant: The second participant is one of my relatives. She is sixty years old. She is a retired school master. She does not have much knowledge about the websites but have enough to access one properly. She has also access the website through her 15 inch laptop. She though that the appearance of the site is good but later she realized the color combinations are not attractive. She liked how all the required information is present in each of the pages of the website. She liked the use of the Java script for style purpose. She did not like that in order to access all the contact information, a user has to go down to footer page.

Comparison of Views: After analyzing views of both the participants toward the site, it has been found that the participant one liked the style of website but participant two did not. The view of the second participant is more meaningful as she recognized the use of colors are not good for long staying users.

The Human Computer Interaction design principles that has been followed within the site are as following.

1. Requirement analysis: gameology has established the goals and objectives of the site based on the perspective of the customer and the objective of the organization. The organization has agreed to consider the requirements of the user as the highest priority in order to gain usability requirements. As there was no existing versions of the site it was not be appraised (Visinescu et al. 2015). The completion was evaluated and the result of the market competition evaluation can be seen in every section of the site. The most crucial part was discussion with the potential users. The responsible team members created questionnaires so that all the required data can be gained from the users (Benyon 2014). The team members also used interview and survey to collect data.
2. Conceptual Proposal: The site design was perfectly outlines that is why the navigation has been so perfect (Chisnell and Redish 2016). The essential features of the site are easily accessible which is possible because of proper analysis.

• Prototyping: Any website cannot be designed so effectively without prototyping. Proven methods were used for understanding and creating the usability of the website (Chow, Bridges and Commander 2014). The designers used new approaches and methods to define usability. This new approach is always a welcome from technology point of view as it the source of innovation (Pallud and Straub 2014).

1. Development: The functionalities of the website had been tested profoundly. The quality of the usability has been untamed. The organization has used the evaluation result to improve the final product that is the website (McClellan et al. 2016). This can be stated as the final product is equipped with so much new things in a very simple form that cannot be possible without evaluation.

Style: The use of the light colors are the best choice for designing a website. This guideline may not be followed sometimes but in those cases proper evaluation of the appearance of the site has to be done. The website of gameology does not have proper usage of colors. The contrasting colors like black, red and green does not look good. The gaps between the product catalogues has to be reduced.

Making less use of JavaScript: Use less amount of JavaScript in the site can reduce the loading time as well as make it simple. The main motto of the site is to sell products and promote business. The use of extensive JavaScript will bind the users into the appearance. This will reduce the time user have to purchase product. The website must be using simple elements everywhere possible and make sure that each element direct the customer attention toward the product.

Using a Different Contact Page: The site does not provide access to a different contact page in the home page menu. The contact information is however is present in the footer of the site. This is a huge downfall from the customer perspective.

Conclusion:

From the above study it can be concluded that the usability of the site is very good but the appearance is very low quality. In this situation, the question remains whether the users will prefer this site because of the usability or start ignoring it because of wrong styling. Gameology has taken the upper hand here by using the most powerful element of a website perfectly. The use of the contents has been a great way of attracting user focus on the purchasing not the style. The contents always drives user’s focus toward the offers available in the products and the vast quantity of products. Every user almost will forget about the style of the website and the main part will be interaction. The interaction between the user and the website serves as the main aspect of the site which is considered to be the most crucial feature of site while user is shopping.

References:

Benyon, D., 2014. Designing Interactive Systems: A comprehensive guide to HCI, UX and interaction design, 3/E.

Britto, T. and Pizzolato, E., 2016. Towards web accessibility guidelines of interaction and interf ace design for people with autism spectrum disorder. In ACHI 2016: The ninth international conference on advances in computer-human interactions (pp. 1-7).

Chisnell, D. and Redish, J.G., 2016. Modelling older adults for website design. In Generational Use of New Media (pp. 125-154). Routledge.

Chow, A.S., Bridges, M. and Commander, P., 2014. The website design and usability of US academic and public libraries. Reference & user services quarterly, 53(3), pp.253-265.

Eveland Jr, W.P. and Dunwoody, S., 2016. Users and navigation patterns of a science World Wide Web site for the public. Public understanding of science.

Gameology. 2018. Gameology - Australia Largest and Cheapest Range of Board Game. [online] Available at: https://www.gameology.com.au [Accessed 23 Mar. 2018].

Johnson, L., Becker, S.A., Estrada, V. and Freeman, A., 2015. NMC horizon report: 2015 library edition (pp. 1-54). The New Media Consortium.

Karsai, G., Krahn, H., Pinkernell, C., Rumpe, B., Schindler, M. and Völkel, S., 2014. Design guidelines for domain specific languages. arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.2378.

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McClellan, M.A., Karumur, R.P., Vogel, R.I., Petzel, S.V., Cragg, J., Chan, D., Jacko, J.A., Sainfort, F. and Geller, M.A., 2016. Designing an educational website to improve quality of supportive oncology care for women with ovarian cancer: an expert usability review and analysis. International journal of human-computer interaction, 32(4), pp.297-307.

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