I think you will find our redesigning methods viable. Our research suggests that you should consider our changes towards the website.

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1 Memo Date: December 11, 2015 To: From: Web Developer Group, Lori Bergman, Co Executive Designer Rone Caballero, Co Executive Designer Estefany Montoya, Graphic Design Specialist Subject: Recommendation Report for Changes to Serebii.net Attached is the report for Redesigning Serebii.net. We completed the tasks described in our proposal on October 26, 2015, evaluating the flaws of the informational website by observing why the website is decreasing in number of users, assessing the problem of the population decline, fixing the features of the website, and determining if there is a growth in the statistics. To perform such tasks, our team has analyzed the current condition of the website. We then analyzed what was giving us a hard time to use the website and recorded them if they occur on a consistent basis. Finally, We then conducted a survey among the users of specific demographics that have found the same problem. Our research suggests that your contents are difficult to navigate because of several factors. One factor is that the menu is too condensed that the user is overwhelmed with content. Another factor is that the text for the website is quite small, making it more difficult for users to find their wanted content. Finally, a minor complaint from the disabled demographic about not having disability aids. These issues are further explained in the research. I think you will find our redesigning methods viable. Our research suggests that you should consider our changes towards the website. If you have any questions or concerns, please leave us a message either by phone (555) or by web_developer@gmail.com. Sincerely, Rone Caballero Estefany Montoya Lori Bergman,,,

2 1 Redesigning Serebii.net: A Recommendation Report Prepared For: Webmaster@serebii.net Prepared By: Lori Bergman, Co Executive Designer Rone Caballero, Co Executive Designer Estefany Montoya, Graphic Design Specialist December 11, 2015

3 2 Abstract Re Designing Serebii.net: A Recommendation Report Prepared By: Lori Bergman, Co Executive Designer Rone Caballero, Co Executive Designer Estefany Montoya, Graphic Design Specialist In our evolving information age, online users would rather get information on a website that has better design. The appeal on the user's eyes correlates mostly about efficiency. For example, a website is more appealing by its carousel, displaying a large amount of content in a small amount of space. Alternatively, a website can just condense its menu using drop down functions. The use of such functions provide easiness and consistency for the users. If the users find the website convenient to use, then the users would constantly come back for the contents. When it comes to informative websites, video game strategy websites in particular, convenience is an essential aspect of their material. Not only will the content provide quick answers to questions frequently asked by the users, the found answers will also be easy enough to find to come back for referencing later. In conclusion, websites are only growing more complex as time goes by with extra features added everyday. The main objective from these websites are to attract more users. To do so, the website must find an optimal design for all of its content to be neatly placed and have the users find a sense of reliability.

4 3 Table of Contents List of Illustrations. 4 Executive Summary...5 Introduction....6 Redesigning Methods Task 1: Condense Side Menu....7 Task 2: Modify Top Menu..8 Task 3: Reformat News Task 4: Adding Aids...9 Results Task 1: Condense Side Menu....9 Task 2: Modify Top Menu Task 3: Reformat News Task 4: Adding Aids Conclusions...12 Recommendation References Appendices Appendix A: Questionnaire Appendix B: Questionnaire Appendix C: Questionnaire

5 4 List of Illustrations Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 People with disabilities who use the Internet....9 Do you find the text too small? How much do you like the updated news system? Do you find serebii.net easy to navigate?

6 5 Executive Summary Serebii.net is a website where all Pokémon fans can go for up to date news, databases, Trading Card Game (TCG) sets, TV shows, video games, and information about all things Pokémon. It is a website that has the capability of tending to millions of Pokémon fans and enthusiasts around the world. For this reason the website has the responsibility of changing things on its site to provide a better service to its viewers. Serebii.net is in need of change. While accessing the site, it is clear the kind of problems the site is facing. At first glance, there is a lot of information for anything to stand out. Text is small and compressed within the site, which can be hard on everyone s eyesight. The menus, both side and top, are not properly formatted. The purpose of the menu is to make everything on a website easier to find, this does not. The news format provided by the website is not done in an organized manner. All news or information related with Pokemon is located on the center of the site. Readers who would like to read older news from the website would have to scroll down the page, having to look through unnecessary information. These type of problems have the opportunity to change with methods that will prove beneficial to the entire website. Our first method, to resolve the problems previously mentioned, was to condense the side menu. Our goal is to do a top down menu so that users have an easier time accessing the things they are looking for. The second method we established was to modify the top menu. Modifying the top menu is another priority because it would provide an organization that the site readily requires. Organization is always important for a website because as mentioned in byobwebsite.com, The reason it (a website) needs to be well organized is that it helps your prospective customers find what they are looking for. Looking for something at serebii.net can be challenging so these changes can provide a better access to the site. Third, we would reformat the news section of serebii.net because its format can improve immensely. Lastly, adding aids to assist people with disabilities will make this site accessible for an audience that the site may have not previously considered or make changes that can make the site more accessible for all the different Pokemon fans. Fans of Pokemon come from all over the world and their needs need to be met. On the basis of these conclusions, we recommend that Web Developer group proceed with making the recommended methods to the serebii.net website. The changes made by Web Developer group will bring you more users in the future.

7 6 Introduction Serebii.net is a website where all Pokémon fans can go for up to date news, databases, TCG sets, TV shows, video games, and information about all things Pokémon. It is a website that has the capability of tending to millions of Pokémon fans and enthusiasts around the world. For this reason the website has the responsibility of changing things on its site to provide a better service to its viewers. The purpose of this report is to present information and offer recommendations. Currently, serebii.net services many Pokémon fans and just anyone who has an interest in the Pokémon world. Changes to its website can have many people coming back; a new design would make everything easier to find. All fans and people curious to see the world of Pokémon deserve a site that is presented in an organized manner. When you first access serebii.net, you find a lot of information on its home page. All that information makes it impossible for the eyes to focus on anything specifically. Unless you are an active user of this website and have become familiarized with it, there is a much need for improvement. The text size is a major issue because it is very small and the menu s location is not ideal, among other flaws mentioned earlier. These changes can facilitate the user s viewing of the site and find its content quicker. A well designed website takes into consideration the users for more people to return. Serebii.net needs to make changes in order to have a well designed website. A well designed website is key for having more users access your site. As mentioned in antemeridiemdesign.com, You re looking for visitors who browse through your site and get to know who you are (the site). Remember that most people will leave after one glimpse at your site. It takes something special to keep them interested, let alone willing to buy your product or service. Another benefit of having a well designed website is that your form and structure has a purpose, Most people will not put in the effort to understand what you are trying to say. Large blocks of small text, confusing navigation, and obscured calls to action will turn visitors away. Serebii.net needs to make changes to its features to have a more accessible website. We are not declaring that serebii.net is a bad website it is just that the organization of the site needs to change. Everything on the site is great for all aspects of Pokémon from information, games, and forums where fans can interact and post. We do not plan to change what Serebii.net offers to its users because the content is great, it is the organization that needs help. According to the Houston Chronicle organization provides guidance and clarity for any given site; however this is something lacking from serebii.net. To begin making the changes that serebii.net needs or give it what it is lacking, we created surveys that many of serebii.net users or vierwers could be able to answer. Our questionnaires were done at a small scale and were meant to answer questions that displayed the overall satisfaction that the users who accessed the site had. Additionally we prepared other patterns to analyze the data we received from our questionnaires and surveys. Next, we present the different findings we obtained from our data.

8 7 From our findings we determined that our previous notions on what the website is in need of were correct. We decided to make the changes proposed as a basis to show what an improvement this meant for the site Based on the survey, Figure 2, Did you find the menu text too small? before the changes were made about 70% of users found that the users found the text too small after the changes were made the numbers dropped more than half. Other surveys showed the importance of the internet for people with disabilities, see Figure 1, and showed how active they are navigating the web. Figure 3 showed how an updated system proved to be of many of the user's liking. Lastly Figure 4 shows how the aids we have provided to the website has made a positive change to people with disabilities and the way the changes made to the website could ultimately mean having more people access serebii.net. These type of surveys and questionnaires served the purpose of showing how effective our changes were and what benefits it can provide to the serebii.net website. On the basis of these findings, we recommend that Web Developer group proceed with its process of making the changes expressed previously as it will only make serebii.net a better website. In the following sections, we provide additional details about our research methods, the results we obtained, the conclusions we drew from those results, and our recommendation. Redesigning Methods With approval of this project, the team would take the follow measures to improve the website Task 1: Condense the Side Menu Pokemon have variations of games, TCG sets, anime episodes, etc. Because Serebii lacks solution to add all this information, more subcategories get thrown into the side bar. It is important to easily access what you want in a website. Having a menu that stretches so far down makes a visitor rely on the Ctrl + F function instead. We will condense all these different subcategories to their own menu page instead of cluttering the side menu. For example, the first section of the menu has different Pokedex links for every generation of games released. Features have been added and removed as more generations come, yet no pokemon have been removed. A single Pokedex link, with the user having the option to choose the generation, should solve the problem. To condense the side menu further, we will turn all categories, such as anime, video game, etc. into drop down menus. Because of the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph, the list of items from every category combined makes the side menu unnecessarily large. So, letting the user decide which category to expand would make the menu cleaner.

9 8 Once the menu is sufficiently condensed, making the text bigger and contrast more with the background is the next step. Black text on dark green background is not the best contrast and is nearly impossible to read especially with small texts. The category titles on the side menu also needs to be changed as the only thing distinguishing the similar background and text colors is a dark green shadow. Task 2: Modify the Top Menu The top menu is small and easy to miss. Enlarging this menu would fix this problem. It would also help those that have a hard time reading small text to navigate this menu. In addition, the redundant links on the top menu also needs to be removed, as the two Pokedex links (XYORAS Pokedex and BW Pokedex) can be found in the side menu. Finally, the FAQ link is hidden in the site s forums, making it inconvenient to find. Putting the FAQ at the top menu can fix this issue effectively. Task 3: Reformat News As mentioned in Markel s Practical Strategies for Technical Communication, using underlined texts to identify a header is a bad idea. The site s sections for news reports are separated by underlined headers. Furthermore, the usage of the serebii logo after every news article is unnecessary. A change to the headers used in the news section is highly recommended. In serebii.net, each news section is divided with the use of headers: one for recent games and one for new cartoon episodes. However, these headers are not consistent. For example, there is anime department news, then there is games department, then anime news again. Headers for news articles would keep news of all the different subcategories of the franchise together. A solution for this will be using a system where each section is identifiable without using a lot of space. Using a bold text and large headers will identify each news report easily. This will fix the unnecessary usage of the site s logo. An alternative method to solving this problem is by making a carousel. The change will keep unnecessary scrolling and searching to a minimum. Task 4: Add Aids for People with Disabilities A research was conducted from a website in Australia about people with disabilities who uses the internet in Figure 1.

9 Figure 1 : People of Disability and their Internet Usage http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/4429.

10 9 Figure 1 : People of Disability and their Internet Usage Taking in consideration of Australia s surprisingly high proportion people with disabilities, websites should provide features to assist them. Serebii is mostly text based and fairly readable by voice software used by the blind. However, the news section constantly uses pictures to show off the new episode of the anime/cartoon or a part of a magazine that reveals a new Pokemon. A picture caption for each image is recommended since these are important part of the news. Another recommendation is keyboard shortcuts. As of right now, the site requires a lot of scrolling to get anywhere. Condensing the side menu and moving the news articles to their own page will fix the issue. The specifics of what to do are still unclear as we need to design them to match the redesigned site. Keeping the links on the page as texts will let a mobility impaired user type Ctrl + F. This will let users access what they want without moving all around the page. Task 1: Condense the Side Menu Results Every subcategory has it s own drop down menu now, reducing the need for large amounts of scrolling and makes the website far more accessible to its users. The multiple Pokedex links have been removed as well. Now there is only a single Pokedex link that leads to every Pokedex originally linked in the original side menu. It didn t shrink the side menu as much as the implementation of drop down menus did but it definitely decluttered the menu.

11 10 Task 2: Modify the Top Menu The top menu is now visible and makes important parts of the website easier to access. The text was made larger and redundant links were removed. We also polled around 200 users before and after we enlarged the top menu text at November 20, Figure 2 shows the result. Figure 2 : Percentage of users liking the text size before and after the update. Task 3: Reformat News A new carousel was added to the front page, listing the recent Pokemon anime, games, etc. news. This has shrunk the front page s length considerably and let s a user access what sort of news they want to read automatically. We also polled the same 200 users from Figure 2 to rate how much they liked the updated news system from 1 to 5 with 1 being that they didn t like it at all to 5 being that they were extremely happy with it. Results are shown in Figure 3.

12 11 Figure 3: Percentage of users about the updated system. Task 4: Add Aids for People with Disabilities The headers for the side menu were turned into text, allowing a quick Ctrl + F. Photos now have mouse over captions that lets voice programs describe the picture. In Figure 4 we polled a group of 50 people with disabilities that had navigated the site beforehand. Figure 4 : Percentage of approval rate for disability aids.

13 12 Conclusions User attitudes From the two surveys conducted from the website, the users have provided positive results. Before the changes were applied, about 67 percent of the users questioned found the small texts too small to read. After the convenient features were added into the website, 75 percent of the users answered that the text was not small and found the texts large enough to read. After the evaluation of the text has been analyzed, the overall update of the website was evaluated. The next survey conducted has shown that about a third or 33 percent of the users has liked the overall update of the website. 27 percent liked some of the changes made, 20 percent were neutral to the update, 13 percent did not like some of the changes, and seven percent did not like the changes at all. With a majority of the reactions yielding to positive results, the effectiveness of the fixation is immediately noticeable. The rise in user population is most likely going to increase if the changes were applied. People with disability attitudes Because of addition of the visual aids, a new demographic of users have been added to the website. The last study made was to survey 50 people with disabilities to see if they can navigate the website easily. The result displayed that 40 of them did not have trouble navigating through the website. Not did the new demographic increased the number of users for the website, it also established an alternate process of reading the website for future users. Overall characteristics of the website The increase in users and the new feature for the people with disabilities lead to the website s overcoming of being cluttered and inconvenient. Since people who use the internet prefer websites with simple navigation, the website would have the ability to increase the number of users over time if the update is officially added today.

14 13 Recommendation Although there were no major complaints about inconvenience was made throughout the years that serebii was public, our company still highly recommend that the changes to the website to be official. More users will attend the website more often and a new wave of users will be included in the user population. We understand that budget may be a factor to the refusal of the changes. The issue is not an urgent matter and can be decided later in the future. Keep in mind, on the other hand, that more and more Pokemon content will come in the near future. Therefore, we highly recommend the changes when possible.

15 14 References Am design. (n.d.). Retrieved October 8, How Much Does It Cost To Build A Website In 2014? (2014, December 4). Retrieved October 13, 2015 The Importance of Good Site Organization. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2015, from to build a website/thesis theme/lesson 7 site organization/why it is important/, Markel, M. (2013). Writing for Your Readers. In Practical Strategies for Technical Communication (p. 108). Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin's. Why Is Organizational Structure Important? (n.d.). Retrieved October 7, 2015.

16 15 Appendix A: Serebii.net users Questionnaire 1 This is the questionaire we distributed to a group of serebii.net users. The purpose of the survey is to give an idea whether the text sizes are small or not. Directions: As you may know, serebii.net has alot of text on the site. We are asking 200 active user of serebii.net to participate in this study and you are one of them. We greatly appreciate answering the following question. Date: Did you find the menu text too small? Circle One: A. Yes B. No

17 16 Appendix B: Serebii.net users Questionnaire 2 This is the questionaire we distributed to a group of serebii.net users. The purpose of the survey is to determine how all the changes affected the website and how the serebii.net users view these new changes. Directions: As you may know we have made changes to the website serebii.net. We are asking 200 active user of serebii.net to participate in this study and you are one of them. We greatly appreciate answering the following question. How much do you like the updated new system? As Web Developer group we have made changes to the website serebii.net. These changes are meant to improve the website. By your opinion we are hoping to get a better understanding of how our changes have had an effect to the serebii.net website. Circle only ONE: 1. I do not like any of the changes made. 2. I do not like some of the changes made on the website. 3. I neither like it or hate the updates made. 4. I like some of the changes made on the website. 5. I like all of the changes made on the website.

18 17 Appendix C: Serebii.net users Questionnaire 3 This is the questionaire we distributed to a group of serebii.net users. The purpose of the survey is to determine if the changes assist serebii.net users better in navigating the website. Directions: As you may know we have made changes to the website serebii.net. We are asking 50 active testers of serebii.net to participate in this study and you are one of them. We greatly appreciate answering the following question. Do you find serebii.net easier to navigate? By adding aids to people with disabilities we hope to accomodate the needs faced by the many users who visit serebii.net website every day. Circle One: A. Yes B. No

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