Aalborg Stadsarkiv

This was the first project I worked on for my bachelor in information technology. I worked in a group of 7 people and generally had the role of the project leader, where I was in charge of keeping track of everything and dividing tasks between the group members. The purpose of the project was to analyse the website of Aalborg Stadsarkiv which we did through a usability study and a communication analysis. The usability study was conducted with elderly people since these were determined to be the main target group of the website. Based on our findings we made a redesign of the website where we focused on keeping the main design elements of the original website, and tried to make a redesign that wouldn’t require too much work.

Process

The purpose of the project was to analyse and evaluate the design of a website. The website my group worked with was the website of Aalborg Stadsarkiv. We analysed the website through a usability study with three elderly people as well as through a communication analysis. We also conducted a few interviews and send out a survey to test whether the actual users of the website were elderly as we assumed or if there were different user types.

The usability study was carried out through a within-subject design. The test was done this way primarily because of the low amount of test users, where this design could help counter that weak point. The test was conducted synchronously as a concurrent think-aloud test with a testmonitor to guide the test user as well as predefined tasks that covered the primary functions of the website. Through the test seven usability problems were discovered, which formed the basis of the redesign along with the communication analysis.

Design

Through the analysis of Aalborg Stadsarkivs website the main problematic areas were the navigation on the site, as well as an overwhelming amount of content that was poorly structured and badly conveyed to the user. Naturally these areas became the focus for the redesign. A limitation on the redesign was the fact that Aalborg Stadsarkiv doesn’t have a lot of ressources, and so in order to create a realistic redesign that the organisation could use, it was necessary to make very specific changes that could make a difference without being too costly to develop.

For the problems regarding navigation the main solution was to move the navigation menu to the side and clearly visualise to the user which page was active. This created white space between the navigation menu and the content of the site, which helped distinguish the role of each part of the website to the user. This change was heavily influenced by the gestalt law of proximity.

To further make it clear to the user which functions of the site were meant for navigation and which were related to the content, the navigation buttons were made a lighter shade of blue, so that they would stand out in the aesthetics of the website.

Gallery

This section provides images related to this project, such as sketches, wireframes, screenshots and similar. Click on an image to view the full size.