-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 1
phaseI
Users want to have highly customizable, lightweight, and distraction-free new tab option for their browsers. We focus on solving this issue by conducting research on our competitors and creating a wireframe for the user interface for our product.
First Sprint Goal: Load a custom web page and set up the development environment.
We used several research methods focusing on already existing products and a summary of what our product’s main features should be. We first performed a competitive analysis on several existing products, then selected the most similar to perform a detailed heuristic analysis.
We used competitive analysis on six products including Infinity New Tab, start.me, Momentum, Opera GX, Firefox Personalize Page, and Edge. We chose those applications as they are the most popular options in search results and store pages. We have additionally included several popular browsers, as they have built-in personalized new tab features, and thus are non-direct competitors.
Next, we used heuristic analysis on the product Start.me. We chose this software as it has many features that we are planning to implement. To analyze this product, we used Nielsen's Ten Heuristics for User Interface Design, which covers aspects ranging from user control and efficiency to documentation and error prevention. We graded each heuristic on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is ideal and 1 is lacking entirely, and added comments describing why we think that is the case.
Using Competitive Analysis, we found that most of our competitors are free tools.
Our competitors' strengths include simplicity of use, a great amount of widgets, a pleasant interface with a simple out-of-box experience, great security features, high optimization (from visuals to sound design), and easy access with no additional installations.
However, our evaluation of these companies also showed their weaknesses, such as a small widget selection or low customizability, a required sign-up, a paid subscription, overwhelming customization for new users, and the inability to disable pop-up ads or banners.
The heuristics evaluated were Visibility of System Status, Match Between System and the Real World, User Control and Freedom, Error Prevention, Recognition Rather Than Recall, Flexibility and Efficiency of Use, Aesthetic and Minimalist Design, Recovery from Errors, and Help and Documentation.
We found that the product has a great Visibility of System Status that has no delays and is quite responsive. The product also Matches Between System and the Real World by mirroring how we organize files on a desk—by picking an item, dragging, and dropping it where we desire it to be. While it matches the system and the real world well, it does limit User Control and Freedom as users can only place items in columns, and some widgets are not possible to delete or are hidden under a paywall. The product is consistent as it follows the common conventions: navigation options appear at the top, the search bar is centered, and widgets follow below.
The product is Error Proof due to its warnings whenever you decide to make a great change to the page, but the program is not capable of restoring the changes after you have made them; thus, users have to be careful with their decisions. Start.me is also Flexible and Efficient of Use as changes are applied as soon as you agree to the effect of the changes notification. The widget menu of the program is clean, but the widgets do not follow the same style, which negatively affects the Aesthetic and Minimalist Design appeal. The Help and Documentation is easy to find and filled with many frequently asked questions, an AI chatbot, and professional assistance chat.
Our discoveries show that our possible demographic broadly includes any person using a web browser, but particularly targets people that are highly organized, interested in customization, and people that deal with managing a lot of information (e.g. students).
Heuristic analysis is optimally performed in a professional setting, while our analysis is casual and subject to subjectivity. Moreover, while the analysis was performed by multiple people, our sample size was likely not large enough to be collated properly.