Coursework Two Cmt 1300 2010 – 2011 Introducing Design Principles

Title: Introducing Design Principles
Author: Moothia Vaylen

Summary The following is the coursework about Introducing Design Principles. It is mainly about search engine where we need to time some users doing research on certain search engine. It is some kind of group work for the research but the report is a personal for each student. The report follows.
Introduction
Search engine is a software use to search information on the web. It is displayed as a webpage format. The user only needs to insert the searching data and click on search. The search engine will go and fetch corresponding sites in an indexed database and display then according to their relevance. Novice users have been selected to test and rate certain search engine. The following report will display the methods and result about how the research was conducted.
Methods
The class was divided in to two groups, each of 2 students. The first group will do their research activity on Web browsers and the second group (mine), we will conduct the research for the Search Engine.
Firstly my partner and I, we selected 6 search engines which we will use for the study. The search engines are: 1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. AOL
4. Yandex
5. Lycos
6. Duckduckgo
The six search engine was classified randomly in to two groups of 3. We choose a web browser to drive the experiment. It is Mozilla Firefox. The User for our groups needs to choose a concept which will be search on the search engine. Each search was timed and recorded in a table. The user gave the good points and bad points for the design principles according to their search. The same experiment was repeated with other participants for the second group. The users had to rate each search engine of the second group on a scale of 1 to 10. At the end we had to give what are the best design principles for a search engine.

Results
Focus of Study: Search Engines
Web browser used: Mozilla Firefox

First Group

Time is given in second.

Search

Bibliography: “Adams, R. (2007). Decision and Stress: Cognition and e-Accessibility in the Information Workplace. Universal Access in the Information Society. 5, 363-379.” “Adams, R ., White, A.  and Ceylan, E. (2009). An Acceptability Predictor for Websites. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5616, 628-634.” “Molich, R., and Nielsen, J. (1990a). Improving a human-computer dialogue, Communications of the ACM 33, 3 (March), 338-348.” “Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI '90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249-256.” “Nielsen, J. (1994b). Heuristic evaluation. In Nielsen, J., and Mack, R. L. (Eds.), Usability Inspection Methods, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY.” “Norbisrath, U. and Mosler, C. (2006). Functionality configuration for eHome systems. Proceedings of the 2006 conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research table of contents. Toronto, Ontario, Canada”