Contents
Description Page Number
Article I. Reflection 3
Article II. Web Application Development Evaluation 4-5
2.01. Test Driven Development
Article III. User Experience Evaluation 6-7
3.01. Web Usability and Accessibility
Article IV. Appendices 8-18
4.01. User Consent Form
4.02. User Profile
4.03. Requirements Catalogue
4.04. Participant Interview Questions 1
4.05. Participant Interview Questions 2
4.06. Proof of Validation
4.07. Test Plan
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,Article I. Reflection
This section of the report is reflecting on the guest lecture presented by
Jonathan Healey for Net Construct. The lecture clarified the importance of
making an impact with a website which involved technical and marketing
aspects merging together. The three main points to ensuring a website
becomes successful is acquisition which uses SEO to get users onto the
websites, conversion which uses CRO to keep the users on the websites long
enough to get some value out of them and retention which involves CXM to
make sure users return.
This was relevant to the development of part A of the module – the portfolio,
because it helped to get users to the website with the use of SEO techniques
such as focusing on the technical build and the site content, as well as the
use of an online SEO site checker. The lecture also gave an insight into what
prospective employers are looking for in a candidate.
Although there was not enough time to investigate further into CRO and CXM
it did provide some useful real-life examples i.e. key demographics and IP
address lookups, which would be useful in terms of the final project.
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, Article II. Web Application Development Evaluation
Section 2.01 EC Test Driven Development
Testing a website is important to ensure it complies with the web standards; if
everything is working correctly, it not only helps users want to return, but it
also helps in terms of SEO, CRO and CXM.
Test driven development is where a developer produces the requirements and
designs before any code is written. It is important to conduct ongoing testing
throughout development to ensure the outcome produces clean code. A test
will be created, and it will then be run, if it results in a fail, amendments will be
made and the test will be run again, this process will be repeated until the test
is passed.
When performing tests on a website, a number of topics could be looked at,
for example, one could test the functionality of the website, the usability, the
accessibility, the performance, the security, the validation, the
responsiveness, the persuasiveness, the navigability, or the compatibility,
although these are the main areas that are looked at when testing, there is
still a number of other areas that could be tested.
There are a number of advantages to testing via a TDD for example there is a
short feedback loop so you can always see where you have gone wrong, so it
becomes clear what the problem is and this then makes the problem easier to
rectify which will result in less time spent on the de-bugger, and less time
spent on re-design and re-development, making this testing method very cost
efficient.
There are only a few problems with this testing method for instance TDD can
be very time consuming so therefore reduces productivity, and if the design
and requirements are evolving throughout the development of the project the
initial tests will become invalid.
Something to consider with using the test driven development method is the
fact that there are no statistics to prove that this method is more successful
than other methods, however this is probably due to the fact that companies
would not develop the product using a test driven development and then
develop the product again without one, so finding useful statistics is difficult.
For the final year project some initial requirements were created along with
initial designs and testing documents. It was clear that the requirements
catalogue and initial designs would be likely to change after the interview with
the chosen target audience and research into accessibility, usability and
developing for seniors had been conducted.
In order to prevent the initial tests becoming useless and invalid, a start on the
implementation was made without testing, and once the experiment and
research was fully executed, the use of a testing cycle was introduced.
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