Accessibility Evaluation of Wordpress.com
This report provides an analysis of the heuristic evaluation used to evaluate Wordpress, an open source website creation tool that simplifies the process of blogging and website content management. The heuristic evaluation will be performed using the “heuristics” provided by Jacob Nielsen.
For this evaluation, ten heuristics were used to analyze the core functionalities of Wordpress, which include creating blogs, managing website content easily and conveniently for users with no or very knowledge of coding. The goal is to identify major usability flaws in the Wordpress website using Jacob Neilson’s ten heuristic evaluations:
1. Visibility of system status
2. Match …show more content…
The core functionalities of Wordpress, create, customize and publish, which include creating blogs, managing website content easily and conveniently for users with no or very little knowledge of coding. Users can use templates from Wordpress template list and use them as is or customize to their needs. Wordpress offers over 500 free as well as premium templates that are responsive and work efficiently on all devices such as desktop, tablets and smartphones. A user can buy premium templates that range from $10 - $80. But, the hosting costs quickly add up and hosting a serious website can cost from $15 - $25 a month. Wordpress can be accessed at www.wordpress.com. Users get a custom url and access to free templates plus feature plugins by simply creating an user name and …show more content…
The Wordpress homepage and main user tasks were studied
Once these usability problems were identified, they were prioritized based on their severity and ease in fixing.
Heuristics Used
Many heuristics methods are available to help evaluate websites. To best evaluate the website, I combined a set of ten heuristics by Jacob Nielson, Norman principles as well as Gestalt principle. The ten heuristics used to evaluate the Wordpress website are listed below.
1. Visibility of system status: Provides feedback to the user to aid them know the status of an action or system. A website with good feedback provides appropriate feedback within reasonable time. When a new users sign up on the Wordpress website, users are ask to enter a custom site address. As soon as one enters the site address chosen by them, the system gives a instant response on whether or not that particular URL is available or not.
When posting a new post or updating a post there is no clear confirmation screen, just a white bar that suggests the post was published or updated. This can be can be easily missed by the user as they are focused on the publish/update button which has a spinning wheel next to