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Term Paper: Students’ Self-Service Website for Mobile Devices

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Term Paper: Students’ Self-Service Website for Mobile Devices

6/17/2013
Professor: Kiran Chittargi
CIS375

Mobility is on the rise in this current era and it is important to provide access to products for consumers as conveniently as possible. The use of smartphones with high speed data capabilities made it easier to view regular desktop websites without much hassle, but the issue occurs with rendering a website built for a PC on a much smaller screen of a mobile device. Another major issue is that, although the mobile devices are much powerful than they were, they still have compatibility issues with PC websites. For example, Apple’s iOS devices lack flash compatibilities, which is an integral part of many desktop websites today. This lack of compatibility calls for a new and much simpler implementation of an existing desktop website for accessing through a mobile device without much clutter. Building a website specifically for a mobile device allows users to access the website even when they are away from a computer and have an important task at hand. The target audience for such a website is the general people who use it on a daily basis which comprises mostly of students and instructors. Accessing the website through a mobile device comfortably will help the users a great deal. Most students who access the website are fulltime working students and lead a completely busy life, and their need would be able to access the website on their time without much hassle. The following couple examples describe how a mobile website would be able to answer the needs of a user. * The website acts as a virtual university where the user can take care of all his/her academic work. In an event a student has to pay his tuition dues with due date being that same day, but his/her computer is not accessible at the given moment, having a mobile website would help him/her in easing the access to making the payment. * If the user has to post his responses on a discussion board with the deadline approaching, and is away from a computer, the mobile website provides an easier alternative on the go to make a post. * The instructor is travelling and doesn’t have access to a computer, but needs to make an announcement with some vital information, having a mobile website handy would make it much simpler for the instructor to post the announcement.
The website design that will be built for a mobile device, must resemble the regular desktop website as much as possible, but should be better tuned and performance oriented on a mobile device to provide a faster, cleaner and better user experience. In the current desktop website, the most commonly used features by the users are Blackboard, Payment making, keeping track of courses required towards the degree, and learning resources center. These should be the most important points of focus when starting the first build of the website for mobile devices. The design needs to focus on being simple, minimizing the use of plugins, memory friendly, and address the most important needs of the users. The website design for a mobile devices should follow the below guidelines to provide a good user experience. * Mobile devices have a smaller screen, and websites tend provide a lot of information; this should be minimized for a clutter free and comfortable user experience. This can be done by creating submenus and highlighting the actions available for the user to view this information. * Mobile phones have portrait view predominantly which makes it easier to operate them with a single hand. In order to preserve this usability, the best practice would be to avoid horizontal page scrolling, and stick to vertical only scrolling. * Mobile phones have a smaller touch screen, and ideally do not use a mouse cursor for navigation purposes. Therefore, unlike a desktop website the touch targets on a mobile website should be much larger. * Many of the native applications on the mobile devices have a standardized UI which can be adapted in designing the mobile website using the similar menu and button styles. * Lastly, Mobile phones come with an accelerometer which allows the users to switch from portrait to landscape view. Therefore, one should keep in mind while designing a website to make it adaptable between portrait and landscape views.
The design of the webpage is as follows: * When the user first types in the URL for the icampus website, the user is taken to the mobile login page, where he is prompted for login ID/password and after successful login through this page the user is then taken to the home page. * The home page consists of a menu screen and also a sign out option where the user can select various items from the menu. These items consist of blackboard, my account, my academics, learning resource center, enrollment, campus home page, faqs, and contact us buttons. Each click on an item from menu opens a submenu with various other options; for example, my account button would have a submenu of buttons such as account summary, make a payment, payment history etc. * The user can also enroll in classes through the mobile website using the enrollment menu and clicking the add class sub-menu button. This takes the user to a new enrollment page which allows the user to search for a particular course they are interested in for a certain quarter and displays the search results in the bottom half of the page with check boxes to the left side of each course. Once, the user selects a particular course, they can add the course to their schedule by simply clicking the add button at the bottom of the screen.
The interface of the mobile website is very comfortable to use and clutter free. The menu buttons and text are large enough for touch pointing, and help in creating a friendly user interface. The inclusion of sub-menus in the user interface minimizes the amount of information that is displayed on a single webpage and helps the webpage from looking congested. The user interface is well designed in terms of adaptability to both landscape and portrait orientation, and also horizontal scrolling is avoided for the most part by aligning all the menu items vertically.

Prototype Proposal
Purpose – The purpose of this article is to propose and evaluate a mobile website design for the desktop website “icampus,” and address the necessary research and testing that needs to be done to implement this website across various mobile platforms.
Design and Approach – Mobile devices used today are a whole lot powerful than previous generation’s and provide a whole lot of flexibility for the design of a website specifically for mobility purposes. The design will be much simpler compared to the desktop version with only the essential menu items included. The design will avoid use of high memory consuming plugins which might slow down the overall performance of a mobile device. The information provided on each page is kept to minimal allowing the user to have a much friendlier and cleaner experience while working through the mobile device. The home page consists of a menu screen and also a sign out option where the user can select various items from the menu. These items consist of blackboard, my account, my academics, learning resource center, enrollment, campus home page, faqs, and contact us buttons. Each click on an item from menu opens a submenu with various other options; for example, my account button would have a submenu of buttons such as account summary, make a payment, payment history etc. The user can also enroll in classes through the mobile website using the enrollment menu and clicking the add class sub-menu button. This takes the user to a new enrollment page which allows the user to search for a particular course they are interested in for a certain quarter and displays the search results in the bottom half of the page with check boxes to the left side of each course. Once, the user selects a particular course, they can add the course to their schedule by simply clicking the add button at the bottom of the screen.
Usability Testing and Evaluation – The usability testing for such a device has to be done in a natural setting by real students and instructors. The students of a certain “human computer interaction” class will be provided with access to the mobile version of the website where they will test out the new mobile website through their mobile devices to carry out their regular course activities, and rate the performance and provide feedback at the end of each session. The students will be awarded extra credit for their participation in this Usability Testing scenario.
Practical Implications – Successful testing and development of such a mobile website will go a long way in helping the student’s access their course materials and self-service portal with much ease and flexibility. Professors can also make any announcements on the go in their busy lives without much trouble.

Mobile Self-Service
The home page consists of a menu screen and also a sign out option where the user can select various items from the menu. These items consist of blackboard, my account, my academics, learning resource center, enrollment, campus home page, faqs, and contact us buttons. Each click on an item from menu opens a submenu with various other options; for example, my account button would have a submenu of buttons such as account summary, make a payment, payment history etc. The user can also enroll in classes through the mobile website using the enrollment menu and clicking the add class sub-menu button. This takes the user to a new enrollment page which allows the user to search for a particular course they are interested in for a certain quarter and displays the search results in the bottom half of the page with check boxes to the left side of each course. Once, the user selects a particular course, they can add the course to their schedule by simply clicking the add button at the bottom of the screen. The user can also make payments, read library books and perform many other tasks through this service.
The mobile industry is ever growing, and more powerful Operating Systems and devices are bound to make entry into the market in the future. In order to keep the website growing along with the growing mobile industry the website should be developed in the most common way possible between most of the platforms. Integrating the website with a single OS will lead to development of separate website for multiple OS platforms. This can be avoided by having the same core code, but having different aesthetics to the website for each OS.

References:
Fay, D. (April 17, 2013.) Mobile Web Design for Content-Heavy Websites: 8 Clever Techniques from Golf Digest. http://www.mobify.com/blog/mobile-web-design-for-content-heavy-websites/
Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., and Preece, J. (2011). Interaction design (3rd ed.). Chichester, U.K.: Wiley
Lentz, J.L. (July 26, 2011.) User interface design for the mobile web. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-interface/

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