NM3221: Blog Post (Week 3)

Deciding on which mobile/web asset to evaluate is not easy. The approach my group took was to list out all the mobile applications we commonly used and then try to find specific details we did not like on the applications. It was difficult for us as we use them everyday to the point that we are so used to their designs and interfaces, everything seemed so flawless to us. Another problem was that a design flaw for one of us, did not seem to bother the others. All of us had different opinions on our user experiences on the different applications which made it difficult for everyone to arrive at an agreement.

It took awhile, but we finally decided to evaluate on HackerNews application. The application is very popular among people in tech. The purpose of it is to share content that is interesting enough for people curious of anything tech related. We decided on the application as we found it hard to follow the specific tech news we would like to read about. News are not categorised, and depending on how many upvotes an article has, it will be pushed to the top of the screen. What if we are interested in something, but it got lost somewhere at the bottom of the screen? The application is similar to Reddit, but even Reddit has different subreddits which groups a certain topic and makes it easier to browse news of a specific type a user is interested in.

I realised that it is much easier to study an application’s design by finding out why the application was created in the first place, then experiencing the navigation and layout of it like how a normal user would do, to perform a certain task.