As Autumn and I climb closer to a completed initial version of the Archaeology 101 Project website, we wanted to get some feedback from individuals in our target audience. Luckily, we spent our Spring Break with my 10-year-old niece, who was happy to take our in-progress website for a test drive. While she was generally complimentary about our work, she provided some needed feedback and came up with some great ideas for how to improve our website.
One critical area of feedback that she provided was in regards to the content of the website. In general, she was able to read and understand the content without difficulty, which is very important. We have worked hard to make our content as accessible as possible while also keeping it informative and interesting, so it was great to see her ability to digest the content. She also enjoyed the interactive elements that we had completed at that point, and appeared to find them engaging and fun.
Something that I asked her about specifically was the amount of text on each page, as we do not want our website to be bogged down with too much text and details. While some pages of our website do have a fair amount of descriptive text, she did not think that there was too much content on our webpage and found our examples helpful. While she found the amount of content to be fine, we still plan on cutting some text in the future to streamline the content and message of each page.
Overall, she liked what we had on the webpage so far, but she also had some recommendations for making it better. Specifically, she requested that we make the website more colorful and that we add “reveal” buttons with some of the interactive elements.
Our current website is composed primarily of black text on a white background, so my niece wished to see more color in the form of pictures and more colorful components within our interactive elements. This is great advice, as our current website looks very clean, but may not catch the eye of the younger audience that we are hoping to engage. We have taken this advice to heart and are currently working to implement her color-filled agenda.
Her second suggestion, more buttons, is also important. In a few spots on our website, we ask the audience a question that is meant to make them think deeper and apply knowledge that they just learned on that page. We had not provided answers to these questions in the content, and she was not happy about that fact. To remedy this mistake, she suggested including a button that the reader could click to find out the answer, another idea that we are currently working to implement. We also hope to include more buttons in general, such as “dig deeper” buttons that will provide interested persons with more information about specific topics throughout the website.
We would both like to say a big thank you to my niece, may your websites always be filled with color and buttons!
Recent Comments