Team Members : Venisa Correia, Raheel Kazi, Venkata Kolli, Saylee Chitre, Vidhya Suresh
Unity ID : vcorrei, rkazi, vkolli, schitre, vidhya
Project Description - The goal of this project was to suggest ways to improve the North Carolina government website : “LINC- (Log Into North Carolina)”. This website provides information about NC State’s population, housing, vital statistics, health, law enforcement, recreation, energy and utilities, government employment, industry, agriculture,transportation, etc.
We performed a survey in-order to record different user’s reaction and experience in using the original LINC website hosted on http://linc.state.nc.us/. Some of the common issues the participants encountered: navigating many web pages to arrive at the required data, a lot of text on web pages, inconsistency among the structure of web pages and deviation from the standard designing principles of web pages. Also, the objective of the LINC website in hosting datasets is not obvious to users.
On the basis of this feedback obtained, we worked on redesigning the website to improve the user experience and developed a working prototype for the same. The points of focus in our design of the prototype have been: addition of user stories to depict the different means of using the data provided by LINC; incorporating icons, graphs, tables, etc. to improve data visualization; simplifying the process of arriving at specific data by reducing the number of clicks; designing as per web standards and making the web pages consistent with one another. A new feature that we have added is to provide for downloading the data as .csv file document. This will be of help to users who plan to use the data for research and do more offline processing with it. Additionally, the prototype also improves the aesthetic appeal of the web-site.
We think that the prototype will provide guidelines to the hosts of the LINC website to revamp their current web-site, make it more usable and user-friendly,thereby attracting more users.
Summary Report link : http://goo.gl/PUxsMa
Hosted Prototype Link: http://ncsuuxclass.github.io/ncdata/LincWebsite/index.html