Reviewing The Design And Usability Of Kakadu National Park Essay.

Your review should consider these specific elements and comment on their use and appropriateness on the news site as part of the overall design of that website.

You need to prepare a simple questionnaire for these users to complete so that you can determine how effectively they can use the site. The questionnaire is to be based on the following scenario:

You need to be able to:

Find out things to do in Kakadu National Park
How to plan your trip toKakadu National Park?

You should ensure that all participants have to check for the same information.

Description of the current User Interface

Situated about a couple of centuries kilometers east of Darwin in the tropical north of Australia, the “Kakadu National Park”, is biggest terrestrial nature park of the nation. It has been the place of huge biological and ecological diversity ("Welcome to Kakadu National Park | Department of the Environment and Energy", 2017).

The official website of the park is required to be reviewed considering specific elements. Their usages and properness on the site is been commented as a portion of the overall website design.

The report has analyzed various features required to design the website. Along with this, the usability of the site is discussed with questionnaires as a survey to clearly make sense of the website design.  

Like other well built websites it has utilized div elements and the CSS to build the expected layout. The website has handled the theme and missing pages effectively by sending the status code of 404 HTTP. The websites has used the HTTP 302 temporary redirect between the URL without or with trailing the slashes. However, the website has followed the best practice by using HTTP 301 as a permanent redirect from the “https://www.parksaustralia.gov.au” to the “https://parksaustralia.gov.au” (Wickham, 2014). All the pages have used some sort of analytics software. This has allowed to completely analyzing the visitor behavior.  All these have been ideal.

However there has been some inefficiency in their site. Five of the overall pages using CSS, has not been appeared optimized to print. Regarding the amount of content it would score average as there been an average of fifty-seven word every page. The quantity of the contents on the site is correlated with the ranking of search engine. None of the pages have been validated. The website’s doctype has been difficult to determine. Finally no images have defined the sizes.

Every page was found including a Meta description. This has been fine as the several engines display the text in pages of search results. Each of the links tested has appeared to be defined well. This is very good since there has been efficiently designed links helping the SEO and the aid accessibility (Treskunov, Hu & Choi, 2013). Moreover, the website has used proper URLs or the web addresses all over. This has been excellent and would help in search engine placement, usability and marketability of the website.

Five of the pages have been utilizing the <u> tag. It has been widely known that the use of the presentation elements such as <u> must be avoided. The website has returned “GZIP encoded” content though the client has not been supporting compression. The compression of GZIP has been fine as it has been popularly supported and decreases load tome of any web-page (Chen et al., 2014). However, few of the devices and the web crawlers could not be supporting the compression of GZIP. Hence the website needs to follow the HTTP header in accept-encoding.

UI navigations and its problems

In order to achieve an exceptional experience for the users, the website has followed some guidelines that are described hereafter:

1) Simplicity:

 From the perspective of usability simplicity has been always useful. The website has employed simplicity in variety of ways. They have not used too many colors and complex themes. The typefaces chosen have been legible. They have not added graphics willy-nilly.

2) Visual hierarchy:

The website call-to-action has sat atop the visual hierarchy. For the beginners it has been positioned on the left side of the page.

3) Navigability:

The framework of the fundamental navigation has been kept simple. There has been usage of “breadcrumbs” on each page except the home page. There has been a search box placed in the top. They have not offered too many options for navigations.

4) Consistency:

The overall feel and look of the site has been consistent throughout every page.

5) Accessibility:

To deliver outstanding user experience, the site has been compatible with various devices, browsers and operating systems (Wagner, Hassanein & Head, 2014).

6) Conventionality:

They have taken advantage of the fact they have already aware of what kind of web experience the visitors have been familiar with.

7) Credibility:

They have been clear about regarding the types of offers they have been providing. They have not made the users to dig through lumps of pages to seek what they have been searching for.

8) User centricity:

One of the user testing tools that they have utilized is the “crazy egg”. This has helped them in tracking numerous domains below a single account. They have also used the Loop11 to simply generate usability tests (Grover, Prakash & Sivaram, 2015).

None of the pages tested has shown any table for layout. This has been very good, because the usage of the tables for the layout has not been necessary. They must only keep the tabular data. Every page has used the page title properly. The page title has appeared at the top of browser window in the search results. Proper title of pages has been important for search engine optimization and usability for the audiences (Bartikowski & Singh, 2014). Every page has been defining headings. This has allowed the visitors and the search engines in summarizing the web page contents very fast. This has been also vital for the search engine optimization.

Regarding popularity the website has observed slight rise in popularity in last three months. The website is linked with the Twitter account- “ParksAustralia (@Parks_Australia)”. It has been also linked to the Facebook of the Parks Australia with about 9000 likes. Everything of the website has been optimized to view on any tablet or mobile phone.

Effectiveness of hyperlinks used

The interface required to be changed have been identified and their significance has been discussed hereafter.

Adding of printable style-sheets:

This could be added wherever possible. This would increase the number of pages optimized for printing.

Usage of semantic tags: 

This should be used replacing the presentational tags then styling with CSS is to be done. This would enhance the cod equality.

Ensuring of GZIO compressed content: 

This is to be returned after the client sends accept-encoding, the GZIP header. This would increase server behavior (Oyibo, Ali & Vassileva, 2016).

Sharing of content with social media buttons:

This should be encouraged on the pages and articles of the website. This would raise the social interests.

Adding of height and width attributes in image tags:

Every image tags should be added with height and width attributes. This must be similar as the source image. As a resizing of an image is required in the browser, CSS can be used. This would enhance the size definition and resizing of the images.

Conclusion:

The conducting of the usability review has not been difficult. It has been the best technique to be employed for evaluation of the website design before the users loose over them. The organization should keep in mind that the outcomes of the usability review have been indicative of the issues. This has been rather than a guarantee to them. They still require testing with the users further. The expert review would be helpful to determine the “usability bloopers” with the web-site. This has been fast, cost-effective and delivers sanity check immediately for their design. The design has been very professional and would definitely appeal average users. This is because its layout has been very simple and too effective. It contains a flawless look and any expert from technical background must appreciate it. It makes the visitors feel comfortable. The recommendations made for improvements and alterations would definitely make the organization an epitome of possessing ideal official website online to be discussed.

References:

Bartikowski, B., & Singh, N. (2014). Should all firms adapt websites to international audiences?. Journal of Business Research, 67(3), 246-252.

Chen, S., Eskevich, M., Jones, G. J., & O’Connor, N. E. (2014, January). An investigation into feature effectiveness for multimedia hyperlinking. In International Conference on Multimedia Modeling (pp. 251-262). Springer International Publishing.

Grover, V., Prakash, A., & Sivaram, S. (2015). U.S. Patent Application No. 14/795,519.

Johnston, I. A., & Brandsma, T. W. (2015, January). Website Usability Testing & Analysis: Begin with a Solid Plan. In First Empirical Libraries Symposium.

Oyibo, K., Ali, Y. S., & Vassileva, J. (2016, April). An Empirical Analysis of the Perception of Mobile Website Interfaces and the Influence of Culture. In PPT@ PERSUASIVE (pp. 44-56).

Treskunov, A., Hu, Y., & Choi, S. (2013). U.S. Patent Application No. 14/107,905.

Wagner, N., Hassanein, K., & Head, M. (2014). The impact of age on website usability. Computers in Human Behavior, 37, 270-282.

Welcome to Kakadu National Park | Department of the Environment and Energy. (2017). Environment.gov.au. Retrieved 22 May 2017, from https://www.environment.gov.au/topics/national-parks/kakadu-national-park

Wickham, H. (2014). httr: Tools for working with URLs and HTTP. R package version 0.5, URL https://CRAN. R-project. org/package= httr.