System Design and Usability Evaluation of Hoot Housing: A Review Website for Off-Campus Student Housing
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Date
2015-12
Authors
Hurlburt, Joy
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Review websites play an integral role in many people's decision making process
on a regular basis. Review websites target a range of users including people choosing
which businesses to support, products to purchase, or services to subscribe to. This
thesis addresses a particular target audience, University of Oregon (UO) students, in
order to introduce positive changes to the current climate of the off-campus student
housing experience. Through the design and development of a review website for
student housing, Hoot Housing, this thesis ultimately seeks to raise the bar for property
management and enrich students' lives by creating an online community of shared
housing experiences.
Designing and developing a new website gives rise to a myriad of
usability issues that could potentially be constructive or destructive to its the future
success. To determine the strengths and weaknesses of the design of Hoot Housing, UO
students participated in usability testing where they performed tasks using the Hoot
Housing website. The performance and preference data collected gave feedback on the
effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of the website. Overall the usability study found that students could effectively and
efficiently use the Hoot Housing website. Student participants expressed satisfaction
with their experience, but communicated concerns with the usefulness of the site. These
concerns originated from the issues of gaining traction amongst the website’s target
audience, the accuracy of the website’s search engine, and the feedback provided while
troubleshooting. Although these pain points did not render the website unusable, they
must be addressed in the redesign of the Hoot Housing website. Participants’ feedback
shed light on possible design solutions to mitigate these usability issues as well as
helped establish usability benchmarks for future usability testing.
Description
144 pages. A thesis presented to the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for degree of Bachelor of Science, Winter 2015
Keywords
Computer science, Information technology, User experience, Usability testing, Web site design, System design, Web development, Hoot housing