Exercise Use guidelines to evaluate other homepages
Choose a homepage (other than your own) to use for this exercise. You might want to try evaluating a competitor's homepage, a site with similar business goals, or a homepage from a popular website that interests you.
Take a screenshot of the homepage, to ensure that you evaluate the same design for all of the guidelines. Capturing the page is necessary, because many sites update their content frequently.
Evaluate whether or not the homepage follows the homepage guidelines (pages 10 to 35 in the English edition). For each guideline, give the site one point if it follows the guideline, or half a point if it only partially follows the guideline.
Add up all of the points.
Divide the total points by 113 (the total number of guidelines). This will give you the percentage of the guidelines that the homepage follows.
Tips
Although you should use your screenshot of the homepage for the exercise, you'll probably need to have the live site available, in order to check some links or functionality.
Limit your scoring to the homepage, even if you need to go to other pages in the design in order to evaluate it. For example, a site might have a section with information about the company, but not have any link to it on the homepage, and so shouldn't get any points for that guideline.
It may be that some of the guidelines don't apply to the homepage you are evaluating. For example, the guidelines for presenting stock quotes would not apply to a page without stock quotes (for example, a homepage for a government agency). If you are certain that a certain guideline doesn't apply, then you should not add a score for that guideline. In such cases, you would use a smaller number than 113 as the divisor in step 5: you would divide by the number of guidelines scored, not counting those that do not apply.
Reading groups can do this exercise in a variety of ways. Groups can evaluate the sites together, but we recommend that each member do the exercise independently, and then get together to compare and discuss the scores and rationale as a group activity.
