My bachelor thesis was about website navigation. I wanted to find out which type of navigation offer the best user experience for users. As an occasional web developer, I had certain idea of what users like and don’t like, but I wanted to find out using analytical data.
So, I decided to build a testing environment, which would deliver different types of navigations to respondents, measure their response type for finding the item they were looking for and record their behavior for closer studying. I also wanted to use this environment for in-person testing, where I wanted to confront my respondents with questions related to their usage of websites and try to understand their behavior.
I wanted to build this web application as robust testing environment, with possibility to use it for other testing of user behavior on websites. This meant that I tried to code the page in blocks, that would offer easy changes (at least in the beginning, where there was still time before the deadline). I was quite happy with these decisions when I found some bugs before release and I needed to make quick changes to the basics of this app.
As a challenge, I did not want to use any of the frameworks for managing data and states of the application. Everything client-side was in plain JavaScript, with server-side API written in PHP.
For the user environment the goal was to make the testing for respondents as easy as possible and as pleasurable as possible – with easy-to-understand texts (in Czech language) and nice looks and animations. I wanted this app to be an experience and based on the feedback I’ve got, I succeeded. But don’t take my word for it, the app is still available online: puchel.cz/bakalarka
