Continuing on with the creation of my website, I went to gather some feedback as to what the people who have already tested the website think of the various versions of the contents list or if they'd prefer to not have it there at all. I asked the Software Manager, the Average Online User, and the Amateur Programmer what they thought of the contents list.
The Software Manager agreed that it didn't look right, and wouldn't look right on the shorter pages, which would have to have this feature as well to avoid confusion. However they deemed that this feature could be done without easily, as there is a list of pages and anchors in the features list already.
The Average Online User thought that perhaps the colours of the contents list could be changed, but also agreed that the page could be viewed easier without it being there.
The Amateur Programmer, the one who suggested this idea, still thought it would look okay. However, since two out of the three agreed that it would more of an inconvenience than a help to the viewer. Since this feature would directly link to the website map in the footer, this feature is something that is already on the website in some capacity.
Although contents lists at the tops of pages would be helpful for some of the pages, not all of the pages would need this, as some pages only have one or two sections to them. This would mean that if the contents list was voided on some pages, the viewer would become confused and the pages would become ununiform and disorganised. This is bad, as a games publisher and producer shouldn't have to spend time working out how a website works, and instead should just be able to easily access all the information a website has to offer.
With that decided, I went back through all the pages of my website to make sure everything was uniform and organised nicely. I then went through the mobile version of the website and adjusted the the lengths of some of the pages, which were slightly inconsistent. I also switched the side that the submit button on the Updates page appeared on to match the computer screen version of the website. It was important that I kept the two versions of the website as similar as possible so that people visiting on multiple devices will not get confused.
The main difference between the mobile and computer versions of the website is that the buttons have to be different sizes. This is the case because of how a phone screen is interacted with as opposed to a computer screen. Majority of computer screens use a mouse or touchpad to interact with them, whereas phones (nowadays) are touchscreen. Fingers are far bigger than a cursor on a computer screen, so naturally buttons have to be more exaggerated as well to avoid someone tapping the wrong button due to two or more buttons being too small and too close together.
Whilst going through the website, I found a few links that didn't work. The first was the PDF link in the features list, which I linked up right away. The second was the User Experience page link in the features list. The text box of the website title was obstructing the link, so I sized it down to fit better. I then moved it down a fraction in the mobile version of the website to balance the page out.
I did some more testing of all the buttons to make sure there were no dead links on the website. I systematically went through the GDD buttons, first by going through the navigator links to each of the pages, and then checking all the links to and from each of the pages that connects them together. I did this to ensure that a user could go through the document in whatever way they wanted.
This concludes the work on my website. There are somethings I was prompted to add in my feedback that I decided against. The first was a drop-down menu for the Game Design Document section of my website. I decided against this for the same reasons that I didn't end up adding a contents list. I felt that it would be too confusing for someone visiting the page for the first time. And there are a lot of pages and sections to my document, so the overload of information might overwhelm someone viewing the website. It would also render the GDD Navigation page useless.
One suggestion for adding this was to try and make the website only display the drop-down menu when in the document section of the website. However, Wix doesn't allow this so I couldn't implement this into the website.
The next post will contain a video tour of my website, which will cover both the computer and mobile versions of the website for a better comparison and exploration experience.
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