IMAT5209 Human Factors in Systems Design

to the designer depending on the packages they choose among the existing three packages which are; Bronze, Silver and Gold. Just as any other application, for any person to use the Logo Maker software, one has create an account with the system and define their login credentials before they could gain access to the services provided by this application. However, the application allows the users to create their logos without first login into the system but upon saving the created logo, any new user will be required to create an account by defining their email and password that will be used for the subsequent access in future. Once logged into the system the user will choose the service he or she wants whether it is logo design, create logo or working with the designer.  These functionalities of the logo make application can be shown in the use case below.

For a new user with no account with the Logo Maker, one will have to click on the Start Your Logo link which will take them to another page where one will be required to provide the logo text which include choosing of the industry category in which the business belongs to, the name of the company, the tagline for this company and the logo type the user needs.

Once this have been provided, the application will provide a number of logo designs for the information provided and upon successfully choosing the design, the user will be able to customize the logo colors and fonts before saving the logo.

All the saved logos will be made available every time the user logs into his or her own account.

Evaluation Methodology

For the evaluation of usability features for this application, a total of eight participants were involved in the research process. These participant included five men and three women, all the participants were computer literate but had not interacted with any online logo creator application before and being owners of small businesses they all needed logo for their business hence making them the best choice in analyzing logo maker ease of use and functionalities (Innes, 2011). The participants were assigned tasks to perform using the application as the researchers observe as well as recording the participants reactions when using the system (Bigby, 2016). After performing these tasks, the participants were required to fill a questionnaire based on the activities they have performed. Later the researchers analyzed the filled questionnaires to gather the participant’s feedback for usability test analysis. The following are the tasks that the participants performed.

Task 1

Considering all the participants were new and did not have an account with the logo maker software, they were required to click the Start Your Logo tab at the far right corner of the application. Once they had done this, the participants were required to follow the step by step approach by providing their business details on the first window, then click Make Logo to be taken to the next stage. On the second window the participants were required to select the design of their choice from the one displayed by the application. Upon selecting the design, the participants were required to edit the logo by changing the colors and fonts depending on their preferences and then save their logo by creating their account and saving their logo to the accounts created.

Task 2

The second task involved participants working directly with the professional designers. The participants were required to click on Work With A Designer tab in the navigation bar. The on the work with a designer page, the participants were needed to click on the Start Now button shown in the page. This took the participants to another page where they were needed to provide a description of their business, choose their logo style from the list, their preferred colors and fonts and provide a description of the images they would like to use in the design. Finally they were required to provide their personal information which include their business name, full name, email address, phone number and their business website. Once all these information have been provided the participants were required to click on Next button to proceed. The next step the participants were needed to choose one of the packages that suits their business from the list provided.  Then afterwards the participants were to receive a call from the professional designer before the logos could be produced.

Task 3

This task required the participants to navigate through all the pages of the application and read the information contained in each page. By so doing the participants were required to note down any information that was not clear. They were also required to list some of the supportive features present in the application and evaluate the design of the webpages used.

The purpose of these tasks was to get to understand more about logo maker by analyzing its functionalities and several features that improve the interaction between the users and the applications. The evaluation procedure ensured that participants had a direct touch of the system and this enabled the researchers to be able to get a firsthand information on what perception the participants had about the application. Throughout the evaluation process, the participants were required also to be keen on various usability features such as the design used, the ease of navigation, the relevance of the information and contents used in the application and how suitable the application was in helping the business owners to design their logo.

The questionnaires filled provided an in-depth feeling about the application by the participants. The questionnaires aimed at gathering evaluation feedback or information that could not be observed when the participants were performing their tasks (Naji, 2016). This evaluation method also made it easy for the researchers to gather quantitative data that helped in sampling the ratings of the feedback as it gave the opportunity to the participants to give their score on various features of this application.

The defined ratings for this research ranged from 1 to 5 and the values represented the information shown below.

1 – Very poor or unsatisfactory

2 – Poor

3 – Average but needed many changes

4 – Good but needed few improvements

5 – Very Good or satisfactory

Using the above ratings, the participants were required to assign each usability feature a rating and this could highly help in analyzing the usability test data collected.

Evaluation Results

The results obtained from this research was based on the observations made by the researcher when the participants were performing the evaluation tasks as well as from the filled questionnaires collected from the eight participants (Meyer, 2018). During the research all the eight participants performed the tasks and filled the questionnaire and the results obtained were as follows.

Task 1

This task was aimed at evaluating the process of own logo creation and obtaining of a user account without the help of a designer. During the evaluation process it was observed that all the participants were able to follow the steps as outlined in the application and 6 out of 8 were able to create their logos successfully and save it into their accounts. 2 out of 8 of the participants encountered slight challenges as they were able to perform the task up to the third step but on the step where they were required to save the created logo they had to be helped. From the results the 6 participants who performed the tasks without help expressed their satisfaction with the way the process was structured and cited that the processes were easy to understand. Some of these processes performed by the participants on this task are as shown in screenshot below.

From the above screenshots, the 2 participants who could not complete the task successfully, were confused by additional information a as preview, creating business card popups and edit logo. These two participants therefore needed some help to differentiate between these features offered by the application before they could perform the tasks to its completion.

From the results obtained in this task therefore, it is evident that a greater percentage of 75% found it easy to navigate through the application and only 25% of the participants needed help to proceed. This results therefore depicts a positive feedback by the participants on the ease of using Logo Maker to create business logos for the new users.

Task 2

This task was aimed at testing the ease of interaction between the business owners and the professional designers via the logo make application. During this period, it was observed that all of the eight participants were able to perform the task up to where one was required to select the design to be used by the designer. At this stage the participants found it hard to submit the design as there was no button nor link to proceed to the next step.

This raised mixed reactions as the participant felt that this functionality was not adequately structured and was not providing the intended relation between the participants and the professional designers. Therefore, there were no participants who managed to reach out to a professional designer using this application. This hindered the successful completion of the tasks and thus raising a usability issue and relevance of this functionality. The participants all suggested that this functionality be corrected or removed since they could create their logos via the logo creator without any professional help. The ratings therefore on this functionality was as shown in the table below.

Test	Very Poor	Poor	Average	Good	Very Good
Ease of use	2	6	-	-	-
Relevance	-	2	5	1	-

From the table above, all the participants were not satisfied with this functionality since 2 of the total participants rated it to be very poor and the rest 6 participants rated it as poor. On the importance of this function, 2 out of 8 felt that this was not important while 5 participant felt that this function was relevant if only it could be made to work and only 1 participant said that the feature was good and it’s only a matter of few improvements and it will work fine. These results therefore, translate to a negative perception about work with a design feature and thus the owners of the Logo Maker application should look into it and solve the issue in order to ease the communication between the user and the designer using this application.

Task 3

The main purpose of this task was to evaluate the general design of the application by looking at how consistent the information and the interfaces looked like. The task also evaluated the content of this application in terms of the supportive features, information clarity and visibility, ease of navigation from one page to the other, retrieval of information such as saved logos and account details and the general interaction of the entire application. The following are some of the results obtained during this evaluation process.

Consistency

Under this usability feature, the participants were required to evaluate the design of the application as well as the consistency of the information used (Mester, 2017). On the design, the participants looked at the placing of different objects such as images, texts and hyperlinks. From the results obtained from the questionnaire on consistency, 5 out of 8 felt that the design and the structuring of the application was fine. They cited that the images used in this application and how the links have been designed were the same across all the web pages as shown below.

The rest 3 participants felt that the application had so many information and this made it more of an informational website than a logo maker application. Hence they stated that part from the inconsistency in the use of texts, the rest of the design was fine as navigation tab, the login link, the application logo and title was the same across all the application.

Ease of navigation

It was observed that the applicants were able to move from one page to the other using the menu bar below.

However, the participants noted that this navigation bar was not made available during self-logo creation or when linking to a professional designer as shown in the screenshot below.

This made it hard for the participants to navigate back to their previous page hence making the navigation process less effective as one had to use a back arrow on the browser to go back to the previous page. On this therefore, all the participants felt that the navigation feature needed some improvement in order to ease the process of moving from one place to the other within the application (Norman, 2014).

Application Information Visibility and Clarity

The information used in this application was found to be visible and clear. All the participants noted that it was easy to read and understand what each page of this application was representing (Schumacher, 2010). However, they unanimously cited that there was some improvements needed to be made on the text font size such as the font used to represent login link at the far right corner of the application as shown.

This made it hard for the users to locate it, it took them sometime to get to see it. Therefore, the participants suggested for a larger font that would be easily visible in order to reduce the time taken to locate it where it was. On the clarity of the content used, all the applicants agreed that the information was easy to understand as it was direct to the point. This made it possible for the users to know what functions a certain feature was to perform.

Supportive Usability Features and Information retrieval mechanisms

The participants, found out that there were no usability supportive features such as search field or top-down arrow to provide speed interaction with the application. As noted the application had so many information and in some pages one had to scroll downwards while searching for the information. This made it hard to quickly search for a word or a certain information without having to go through all the information represented in the application. Therefore the participants felt that in the place where there was such supportive features, the interaction between the users and the application could have been made easier and more interesting. On the information retrieval 6 out of 8 were able to view their account transactions as well as their saved logos by login into their account while 2 of the participants did not. The two who were not able to view their account details, that is, their saved logos and personal information, could not locate where My Account link was located.

All the above results were all collected from the participants after an evaluation process that took about four hours to complete. The observation was done during the process and the questionnaires were filled after the tasks assigned to the participants were done.

Findings and Recommendations

From the results obtained above, it is therefore evident that not all tasks were successfully completed and not all the participants managed to perform all the tasks (Pag, 2018). During the evaluation process there were a number of issues raised by the participants on the usability capabilities of the logo Maker. From this results, it was noted that the application is not complete and there are some functionalities such as work with a designer that were incomplete.

This made it impossible for the users to perform some functions hence making the application more wanting in terms of complete functionalities. On the general performance of the navigation feature in this application, it was noted that all the participants had some challenges as 100% of the participants cited ineffectiveness of the navigation tools and this made it impossible to transverse across the application swiftly.

On the general design of the application 62% of the sample population found it to be okay and only 38% had an issue with it. However, with such a big percentage of 38% feeling unsatisfied with the application design, a need for improvement is necessary in order to be able to satisfy the needs of all the users.

Upon analyzing all the results obtained, the usability acceptance test was found to be at 50% for the logo maker application. This was an average score for the application and the score was affected by the increased number of functionality issues and the fact that almost half of the participants felt that the application needed more improvements to be done for it to serve the intended purpose more effectively. This result therefore can be shown in the analysis graph below.

From these results therefore, it is clear that the application requires a lot of changes and improvements in order to meet all the usability needs that eases user’s interactions (Wong, 2018). Based on this research therefore a number of suggestions were made by the participants (Nielsen, 2018). This recommendations were aimed at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the application in implementing its functionalities. The recommendations made include:

• Use of navigation across all the pages of the application - This will ensure that the user is able to navigate through the application without encountering any problems. It is therefore, recommended that the developers of the logo maker ensures that a navigation tool or link is made available in every web page so that when the user wants to move from the current page to the other, then  that is made possible.
• Inclusion of supportive feature - Due to lack of supportive features such as search text fields and top-down arrows, the participants found it hard to get a given information and therefore they recommended the use of such features in order to improve the interaction of the system with the users.
• Use of complete functions – As it was observe red, the application had some incomplete functionalities that needed to be addressed. It is therefore recommended that the application be reviewed and the incomplete features be updated to completeness so that users of this application do not encounter problems as the one experienced by the participants during the evaluation process.
• Another recommendations made was the use of larger fonts to show the application links such as login. The current font was found to be too small and it took time to locate where the links were due to small font size applied thus need for improvements.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is therefore evident that for an application to pass usability tests a number of things have to be put into considerations in order to attain users satisfaction. These features include the physical design, the application features consistency, visibility of the information, completeness of the applications functions and ease of use. It is therefore important for the application designers to incorporate the users concerns into their design and ensure that all the functionalities are well structured. Therefore, for the logo maker creators, they need to capture all the recommendations suggested by the participants during evaluation in order to improve the human interaction with this system.

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