Free Essay On Website Evaluation

OKCupid.com is the website I have chosen to evaluate. I have chosen this website as the one to evaluate for a variety of reasons. First of all, the website it one that is regularly used by millions of users throughout the world, making it highly relevant in terms of contemporary websites. The high amount of people using this site makes it such that the creators of the site have received a significant amount of feedback regarding its use and have spent a considerable amount of money iterating its design. However, despite the substantial effort that has been put into crafting the design for this product, one can recognize that the site has some design drawbacks. The main drawbacks of the site are that it while it is functional, its design elements have become stale and could benefit from a reinvigorated approach as well as gamification to enhance the product. The site’s homepage design will be the elements that are considered most thoroughly, but design principles throughout the entire site will also be examined. The three design principles I will use to evaluate this site are balance, grouping, and contrast. I have chosen balance because among the categories this is one that the site appears to have been successful in addressing and I reasoned that it would make it fair to consider the site’s stronger elements as well as its weaker elements. This is particularly true in relation to the way that the different segments of the home page are organized, most notably the weight of objects and textures. I will examine grouping because this element is a clear shortcoming of the OKCupid interface design and I believe that if the site designers had grouped together certain components in a different way they would be able to increase the user’s experience with the site. Finally, contrast is chosen because currently the site’s contrast is very low, using similar color elements, and while it may not bother first-time users, people who have been using the site for an extended period may feel that its contrast has become stale and could be enhanced through new color schemes. Ultimately, these elements will be critical to gaining an insightful understanding of the existing design flaws in the OKCupid site design.