A CRITIQUE OF THE OBAFEMI

AWOLOWO UNIVERSITY WEBSITE

(http://www.oauife.edu.ng)

SUBMITTED BY

OLA-FOLUWE DAMARIS ONAMIYOLUWA

CSC/2013/147

COURSE: HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION (CSC 306)

DATE: 19/11/2015

GENERAL OVERVIEW OF THE WEBSITE

A visit to the Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ifes website could be a nightmare or a
favourite meal; it depends on your web use experience and also on your patience. If you are a
visitor looking for news and events in the university, you will not be disappointed as they are
displayed prominently on the site. If you are a visitor looking for the electronic portal of the
university, you might just need a good use of your vision as the text font of the hyperlinks at
the topmost corner of the website is small.
The general overview of the university website is good and will get a pass mark of seven out
of ten. The colours used which are the schools official colours gives it a cool homely feeling.
The use of contrast is quite impressive and the pages have a very similar and uniform theme.
Hyperlinks on the websites are easy to follow and simple surfing can be done easily on the
site
The speed at which the website loads is not too fast which implies that the images used on the
site have not been optimised. The website is not only being updated almost on a daily basis
but it is receiving improvements at a very impressive rate. The faculties hyperlink was
followed from the academics hyperlinks and the faculties of arts and faculties of technology
pages were visited. Two noticeable things were: the pages had changed considerably from a
last visit in 2014 and even though some pages were still under construction (hyperlinks not
working, no content) they were hosted on the web server. The web pages hierarchy of the
website is quite impressive and detailed.
The three webpages of the website to be used in this critique are:
-

The website home page with the url http://www.oauife.edu.ng (Fig 1)

The web page of the university officials with the url
http://www.oauife.edu.ng/administration/offices/ (Fig 2)
The web page of all academic departments in the university with the url
http://www.oauife.edu.ng/academics/department/ (Fig 3)

Fig 1. The Homepage of the University Website (http://www.oauife.edu.ng).

Fig 2. The webpage showing the University Officials

(http://www.oauife.edu.ng/administration/offices/)

Fig 3 The Webpage showing all Academic Departments in the University

http://www.oauife.edu.ng/academics/department/

The website will be critiqued and discussed under the following sub headings:
-

Ease of Use
Understandability
Text and Colour Presentation
Positioning of menus and other tasks
User Friendliness

Ease of Use
The ease of use of a website simply means how easy it is to use the website. Websites have a
specific purpose in the case of http://www.oauife.edu.ng , it is to provide information about
the university and online services to the university community. A website is easy to use if it
has
i.

ii.

iii.

iv.

Valuable content: The university website has valuable content on its pages with
the webpages containing relevant content to the particular link. Using the example
of the homepage (Fig 1), the website contains news, events, and facts about the
university, the vision and mission of the university, navigation menu and
hyperlinks to other parts (pages in) of the website. Another example is the web
page containing the names of all university officials (Fig 2), it gives the
information of those at the helm of affairs in the university.
Good organization: The website is well organized and thought out with a reliable
and workable hierarchy and reference map. For example to access the Department
of Agricultural Extension and Rural Development webpage, the user can either go
through the Faculty of Agriculture a submenu of the Faculties link which is a
submenu of the Academics link on the Navigation menu (Fig 4) or the user can go
through the department link and click on the Agricultural Extension and Rural
Development (Fig 3).
Attractive design: The website is quite attractive with the use of colours and
images sparingly and purposefully. The professional look of the website is inviting
and makes surfing the site interesting. Also the website layout is not only
impressive but consistent and repetitive.
Prominent Logical Navigation: The website has a prominent navigation menu that
is consistently used on the website

Fig 4. The Academics Menu on the Navigation Menu Bar and its Submenu

Understandability
A website is understandable if the language of the content is as easy to understand as
possible. A website that use complex language, misspellings, wrong grammar and
punctuation is not understandable. The content of a webpage should be as brief as possible
providing relevant content. The University website uses simple error-free language and the
content is not cluttered with unnecessary information
An understandable website uses alternative representation such as graphics, audios (podcasts)
and videos sparingly. The pictures and graphics on the website are used with appropriate
meaning such as graphics for the News and Events on the website homepage (Fig 5). The free
talk and video web app Kedu which is an advert also uses appropriate graphics

Fig 5. A Webpage Showing a Piece of News

Another important factor that makes a website understandable is the functionality of the
website. Functionality means that every website component is working as expected i.e. all
hypertext links are working (no broken links), all web forms are working, search boxes are
working and navigation is consistent and predictable throughout the context of the website.
The university website has some broken links that do not lead to a new webpage. The
navigation menu located at the bottom of the website homepage contains broken links that do
not lead to a new webpage but redirects to website homepage (Fig 6). The link to the
department of English webpage is also broken.
The search box in the website home page was found to be working. It was used to search for
the word computer and it gave 53 search results (Fig 7).
The navigation in the website is predictable as it follows a particular pattern
(http://cse.oauife.edu.ng/, http://eee.oauife.edu.ng/,
http://www.oauife.edu.ng/admission/undergraduate-studies/ and
http://www.oauife.edu.ng/administration/offices/) The navigation in the website is not
consistent as the website has two different webpages for the department of computer science
and engineering. The first webpage can be visited through the academic department webpage
(http://www.oauife.edu.ng/academics/departments/) and the second webpage can be visited
through the faculty of technology homepage (http://fet.oauife.edu.ng/). The second webpage

has no content and is under construction yet it was hosted on the webserver. This differences
in web pages can confuse a user and reduces the understandability of the website. This occurs
for more than two web contents. For example the Department of Food science and
technology also has two webpages with the links http://fst.oauife.edu.ng/ and
http://fet.oauife.edu.ng/dept/?id=food. This error or discrepancies are quite confusing and
need to be rectified.

Fig 6. The Navigation Menu at the Bottom of the Webpage with Invalid Links

Fig 7. A Webpage Showing Search Results for the Word Computer

Text and Colour Presentation

The text and colour presentation i.e. the overall appearance of the website is a crucial factor
in determining the user experience. The text font, text colour and text size used in the website
increases or reduces the visual appeal of the website. The theme colour used in a website has
a significant meaning and must be selected carefully so as not to give the wrong impression
to the website visitors. For example the colour red implies violence, passion, fire or
aggression while the colour white implies purity, innocence, truth or peace.
The major text font used in the university website is the Roboto font which is an Arial Sans
serif font and the source is Google web fonts. This text font is a readable clear font whose
size and line height is proportionally used in the webpage. The text size for the main
navigation bar is 13pixels and it is bold making an impression that the navigation bar is an
important web element on the webpage. The major text size used in the website is 12pixels
for the content while the text size for headers (topics) is 26pixels. The text colour used is grey
for ordinary content, blue for hypertext links on a plain blue and white back ground. This
makes the website quite visually appealing and the contrast used is good enough to make you

not mind reading the content of the webpages. The website content is not cluttered and it has
a lot of white spaces making it have a clean layout.
The theme colour used in the university website is deep blue and white which are cool
visually appealing colours which imply that it is an intellectually related website. The
Obafemi Awolowo University logo is a prominent image on all webpages that gives the
website a uniform and consistent look. Also the colour deep blue (midnight blue to be
specific) is the Universitys official colour and projects the Universitys brand (Fig 5).

Positioning of menus and other tasks

The positioning of navigation menu is an important factor that determines users experience.
The navigation menus and other tasks must be logically placed and arranged with a welldefined hierarchy, for example the submenu Academic Departments should not be kept under
the menu Administration. The visitors must understand what each task or menu item means at
first glance and not have to think for long or get a dictionary before getting the meaning of a
task or menu item. For instance, the Contact menu should be left as Contact and not changed
to something not so explicit like Address which could also mean a speech.
The main navigation menu is placed on top of the webpages beside the university logo under
the name of the university and is consistent throughout the website (Fig 8). The top
navigation menu is the main menu and it contains seven menu items and several sub menu
items. The use of a drop down navigation menu makes the menu bar uncluttered as similar
webpages can be grouped together under one heading e.g. Academics which contains
Faculties, Departments and Colleges submenu. This main navigation menu is used
consistently on the website giving it a uniform theme.
Other task menu items are the header menu and the footer menu. The header menu is not a
drop down menu but is a collection of hypertext links to important webpages on the websites
such as the electronic portal of the university, the staff mail, the student mail, the library
portal. The header menu font size is small and not very noticeable but that seems to be
acceptable as these menu items are not supposed to be accessed by visitors to the website but
by members of the university community(Fig 9).
The footer menu has two units; the base footer menu and the top footer menu items(Fig 10).
The base footer menu items contains hypertext links to Search, Directory, Campus Map etc.
This base footer menu item contains broken links that are not linked to the appropriate
webpage and will instead redirect you to the home page, this should be addressed as broken
links put off users. The top footer menu item contains hypertext links to some important units
in the University community such as Distance Learning, Centres and Institutes, Staff
Directory, OAU Journals, OAU Blackboard etc. This top footer menu item contains so many
important hypertext links that could easily lead a user to other webpages without going
through the main navigation menu.
This three menus are consistent throughout the webpages in the main university website and
are present in the three webpages chosen for critique (Fig 11).

Fig 8. The Main Navigation Menu

Fig 9 The Header Menu

Fig 10. The Footer Menu

Fig 11. The bottom part of the University Officials Webpage

User Friendliness
A website is said to be user friendly if users enjoy surfing the site. All subtopics discussed
above contribute in one way or the other to the user friendliness of a website which makes
this subtopic a summary. The university website is quite user friendly and all pages used for
this critique were found to be user friendly on the average.

A user friendly website has

i.

ii.

iii.
iv.
v.

Accessible content: The university websites content is readable with no grammar

error or spelling mistakes. The font used as discussed above is a web font and
non-text content such as pictures and graphics are used appropriately.
A clean layout and is visually appealing: The university has lots of white spaces,
uncluttered content and is easy to navigate making it have a clean layout. A
visually appealing website uses contrast well such as black text on a white
background. On the average the university website is visually appealing with the
right use of colours.
Contact Information: The contact information of the university website can
include a Google map so as to show the physical location of the university.
Fast loading time: The university website does not load fast enough and this can
be addressed by optimizing all images used in the website.
No broken links: There are not only some broken links in the university website
but some entities have different webpages e.g. the department of computer science
and engineering which has two different webpages.

REFERENCES
Webpages
https://www.spritzweb.com/resources/good-website-characteristics.html
http://webaim.org/articles/pour/understandable
https://www.pallasweb.com/color.html
http://www.getbusymedia.com/6-ways-to-make-your-website-more-user-friendly/
Google Chrome Extensions
1. WhatFont
2. ColorPick Eyedropper