Find a Web site with direct customer ordering. Browse through some product descr

ID: 3727253 • Letter: F

Question

Find a Web site with direct customer ordering. Browse through some product descriptions and note the design of the dialogue and the Web pages. What do you like and dislike about the design? Evaluate the Web site based on visibility and affordance. Does the site achieve an optimal balance between the number of page refreshes and the delay between page refreshes? Would your answer change if you were using a different computing device, a different network, or ac- cessing the system at a different time of day? Submit an MS Word document with your response.

Explanation / Answer

I went to

https://www.amazon.in/

and

https://www.flipkart.com/

Yes the sites achieved an optimal balance between the number of page refreshes and the delay between page refreshes.

No my answer would not change if I were using a different computing device, a different network, or ac- cessing the system at a different time of day.

Below are the important Points to consider while designing :

1)Use page links verses tabs

It is important to note that all the elements of a page must be rendered even if portions of the page are not displayed initially. For instance, if you use constructs that have tabs or have expand and contract sections, all the data in those sections still must be rendered. Generally, the display of the data is controlled by the browser with no further interaction with the server (an exception is delayed rendering discussed below). This means that pages with a large amount of data that is gathered and processed but not shown immediately to the user, may be wasted processing if the most likely user interaction is to not look at that tab or hidden section.

Providing a link to a page instead of a tab improves performance by only rendering the data when the user explicitly requests to see it.

2)Delayed rendering

This is a technique to allow the browser to display the page while processing continues with the rendering of portions of page data. Use the future macro to delay processing of portions of the page. These areas of the page will show a loading message until the data is available from the server and then will automatically be shown.

Extracting data from other systems via SQL or other techniques can take a significant amount of time. Similarly for metadata reporting. Is the data static or dynamic? Does it need to be current to the second or just to the day, week, or month?

3)Use caching

The Cache macro allows data to be extracted once and the rendering re-used for subsequent access to the page. The cache macro parameters allow you to control the length of time the data is cached. Care must be taken to not overuse this capability as there is limited amount of memory allocated to the cache across the system. You can optionally provide the user with a refresh button to give them control over the trade-off between the currency of the data and time to display. Recommend only using the refresh option only in limited cases, as it is likely to be used and then the user will be waiting again. Advanced users (authors) can force a refresh anyway by using a request parameter - add ?refresh=true to the page url (sometimes &refresh=true must be added instead if the url already has a request parameter specified).

Converting data from other formats into charts and tables can be expensive. The cache macro can help here too, but there are special considerations for charts. The chart macro converts the chart data into a image that is then sent to the browser to display.

4)Save chart images

There are advanced chart macro parameter for attachments that allow chart images to be automatically rendered and saved. Similarly for Graphviz graphs.

Letting the user make an explicit choice before viewing information that is expensive to produce can sometimes provide a better user experience. Instead of producing a page that has all the data that the user may need, let the user specify their specific need for data first.

5)Let user control information request

Use the Run macro to provide a simple dialog for the user to request data. Once the user requests the data, the data will be rendered and presented based on the parameters the user provides.

6)Download time

The techniques above in many cases also help with download time. Pages with less data download faster. Providing page links to data spread out the interaction time over a number of requests. A balance must be made to make sure the user gets the data they normally want without excessive amount of clicking.

7) Browser

The caching techniques above also help with browser performance. Browser will be able to locally cache static images.

FireFox and Chrome are generally viewed as performing better that IE. Make sure you are using the latest browser (no matter what your browser choice).

8) Automated caching

The first user to view a page after the cache period has expired can be delayed a significant amount of time while the cached data is being refreshed. One way to mitigate that is to have a background process that can cause the cache to be replenished on a regular basis. The trade-off is additional processing that takes place even if no one is viewing the page verses a faster initial display. One technique is to have various pages with different automated refresh times. By adding an include on the time refresh page, that include page will be rendered as well. Alternatively, the automation can just have a list of page with refresh times. Here is an example of standard refresh times:

every 15 minutes

every hour

every 3 hours

every day (6:00am)

every week (Sunday)

once a month (first day of month)