Comp. benchmarking-DowJones
Usability evaluation and benchmarking of free Dow Jones sites college journal and real estate journal.
Role: Usability analyst
Done at: Infosys Technologies Limited, Bangalore
Duration: five weeks
Tasks: Heuristic Evaluation, Cognitive Walkthrough, Competitor Analysis/Benchmarking,
Qualitative/ subjective analysis.
Introduction : This was an exercise conducted at infosys technologies for one of their regular clients – Dow Jones online. a verticals network consisting of free sites like college journal, real estate journal etc was conceived by dow jones online to rive profitability through a high level of traffic and CTRs otherwise unattainable from the paid-subscription model pioneered by WSJ.com.
to identify and address various weaknesses due to which this network was underperforming, the benchmarking exercise was conducted.
Objectives : to evaluate and benchmark the usability of collegejournal.com and realestatejournal.com vis a vis some of their main competitors, and to provide recommendations for improvement.
Figure: – Subjective Usability analysis of Real Estate Journal
Methodology and features
1. understanding context – a brief knowledge transfer session was held between the client and the analysts.
2. usability review – the websites were analyzed by 3-5 usability experts who identified usability issues that ran across several front end aspects of the user interface . (for example, navigation, layout, detailed design). issues were identified by evaluating the application against current research in the field, industry standards and best practices. if applicable, brief written design recommendations were provided along with each issue identified.
3. competitor analysis – the usability of competitor websites was reviewed in context to the user interface areas covered in the previous stage. a generic subjective usability rating was done to identify strong and weak areas of each interfaces as well as to derive comparative usability scores.
The usability review identified issues in the following UI categories:
a) Navigation
b) Layout
c) Visual Design
d) Interaction Design & Functionality
e) Content & Labeling