Borges, Jose, Morales, Israel, Rodriguez, Nestor J. Page Design Guidelines Developed through Usability Testing. University of Puerto Rico – Mayaguez Campus. n.d. Web. 30 November 2014. http://www.ece.uprm.edu/hci/papers/Chapter.pdf

I was unable to find any information on Borges, Morales or Rodriguez as I am assuming they are all Puerto Rican professors with little to no internet presence. The paper was written under the authority of the University of Puerto Rico which is the largest and most diverse public university in Puerto Rico. I therefore felt it was a trustworthy source and worth incorporating into my research.

The author’s thesis centres around a worry that individual website creators with little design knowledge are creating more and more web pages with poor usability and that hinder the use of the websites in general. The authors then go on to describe in detail steps that web designers can take to improve the usability, navigation, appeal and overall design of their website. They focus a lot on research and studies about web design and include a lot of factual evidence behind all of their points.

The author’s intended audience is anyone interested in web design but especially those who may not have a rich background in the field or are interested in looking at the research behind web design and not just one persons opinion.

Unlike a lot of articles about web design that include a lot of personal opinion on behalf of the author, this article is fairly un biased. The authors of the paper are looking extensively at research, facts and figures regarding web design and are not simply relying on what they think looks nice.

This article is very strong in that it provides a lot of evidence for each of the points that the author is making. However its weaknesses come in the large, dense chunks of information full of computer jargon. The article sets out to be a guide for beginner web designers in how to set up a site however it is often very hard and confusing for a beginner to get through.

This article supported much of our thesis in that it provided evidence and factual research for many of the aspects of web design that we thought made a successful website especially highlighting how important navigation is to a website that aims to store a large amount of information.

For the Design Features section of our paper this source was very useful. As I’ve said before it’s hard to find good sources about web design on the internet as they all seem to be so personal but it was really useful to see such in depth research on subjects we were so interested in like where the header should be and how to organise categories. We used this source to guide us and to back up some of the points we made in regard to our website’s design.