Beginners is a website designed for users who need guides and tutorials for any occasion. It will provide a variety of tutorials from supplementary courses, such as Math and English, to hobbies/pastimes, such as playing an instrument and cooking. There will also be different levels of difficulty for these guides depending on the users preference, from beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Users will also be able to upload their own guides as well so that their knowledge can be received by those with similar passions.
We utilized two research methods to gather information on how our competitors operate: competitive analysis and heuristic evaluations.
For competitive analysis, we used Google to search for competitors that focus on helping their users learn new things that they are interested in. After finding a suitable competitor, we listed them in a table and compiled information about the competitor, such as strengths, weaknesses, the quality level of their products, how much it costs to use the product, and what platforms the products can be used on. In addition, we listed what the potential demographics are for the competitors to help us determine the pros and cons that come with our competitors’ products.
When applying the heuristic evaluations against one of our competitors, YouTube, we consulted Nielsen’s “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design” to give a score depending on how well they achieved said heuristics. We first read each of the heuristics to be able to accurately grade YouTube on each of the heuristics. Each of us in the group gave our own scores and reasoning behind the scores by thinking of our interactions with the website, both as someone who watches videos and someone who uploads videos. Then, we came together and shared our findings so that we can all agree on one score for each of the heuristics.
Our findings from the competitive analysis led us to several advantages that our product could have over our competitors’ products. These include making our product free to use, having both text and video options for people to learn from, having some form of quality control to ensure that the content is correct, and giving users the ability to filter guides based on how experienced they are.
The heuristic evaluations gave us an idea on what YouTube does well and what could be improved. Therefore, we can incorporate features into our product that works well in YouTube, such as making the interface as familiar to our users as possible through natural mapping, containing controls that the users have used in other video services (left and right keys to fast forward or rewind, space to pause, escape to exit full screen, etc.), and making the application easy to use by clearly labeling buttons and offering description on what certain actions do. We’ll then improve what YouTube doesn’t do well and add it to our product as well, such as showing better error messages to the user so that they have an easier time fixing said errors and making the application easier to navigate by not displaying an overwhelming amount of information on the screen.
Our research led to the design of some personas and scenarios. Designing these based on our findings helped us visualize the kinds of users that will use our product, which helps with figuring out the correct course of action when developing the application. For example, one of our personas and scenarios involves a busy person that is always on the move in a particularly loud environment, so having the option to watch videos instead of reading text can be valuable for users like these. We also came up with sketches and diagrams that include a simple welcome page for users to easily search things, as well as filters for users to filter guides based on their experience level, as described in one of our user stories. These are the recommendations that we came up with from the results of our research and design artifacts that we will attempt to implement.
One caveat includes not being able to access one of our competitors’ products because a subscription was needed. This competitor was MasterClass, so our findings for them in the competitive analysis may not be too accurate as we made assumptions based on the information that we did have access to on the Internet.