Improving User Experience in 2 hours- Part 1

Improving User Experience in 2 hours - Part 1

This is my attempt to improve a web application's user experience in just under 2 hours. :-) So you are given a task to improve the user experience of a web application. So how will you do it? Let us start with picking up a web application. For this task, let us pick up the website, RankQuest.com. They offer a dozen online SEO tools and some nice SEO articles. They do blog and manage to gain some good amount of traffic too. One of their tool, the Code cleaner is our target now. We will take the question-answer model to discuss our task.

What does Code Cleaner do?
Code Cleaner takes up a webpage, examines the HTML code (note: only the HTML code) and removes the unwanted tags, comments etc. The result of such an action is reduced file size.

How does Code Cleaner interacts with user?
The Code Cleaner requires the URL or the path to a local file. Once the URL/path is given it retrieves the contents, analyzes them and strip out unwanted tags and gives you the result.

What are the information shown as result?
The result is usually a preview of 'trimmed' html code.

Additional information shown are
  1. Page size reduced by : xx bytes
  2. Page size reduced by : xx %
  3. Original page size : xx bytes
  4. Optimized page size : xx bytes
A link to download the optimized code is available. Also a short summary of what has been done is also given below. Refer the image attached below to understand the results. I used my own website URL to check the tool.





Drawbacks in the current User Interface
The UI follows a cluttered layout. There is no clear text or information which can be interpretted as 'Result'. The font sizes do not vary. The Summary which is an essential information is shown in the bottom of the page. The %of bytes saved are not shown prominently. It takes more time to understand the pattern of information displayed.

Concluding, we can say.. there are information shown as results.. but they are poorly organized. The information architecture needs to be tweaked and the categorization of information needs a huge improvement.

..contd in Part 2

- Rajesh Sundaram

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