5 - Chase Buckner

One of the ideas under "The Unnecessary Test" technique is looking at all of the features and recognizing if there are any redundant features, and by that I mean if there are two features that serve the same purpose. While scrutinizing my design of YouTube's homepage, I realized that one of the text boxes listed the most popular videos with a drop down menu to choose different time categories like "daily", "weekly", "monthly", etc. did the exact same thing that my larger, main, text box did at the bottom of the screen. After reading this chapter, I realize that I should get rid of the less purposeful text box so that the users can focus their attention on what is important and not get distracted by features that do the same thing. Aiming low and having a simpler design is much better than a design with all of the bells and whistles. Something else that I noticed that didn't "contribute directly to the completion of the task" of searching for a video is the little magnifying glass next to the search bar. I figured that this wasn't a necessary feature and wouldn't hurt the overall design if it was trimmed out because big search engines like Google don't have features like that. Big search engines assume that the user knows to press the enter button after they have inputted what they want to search. I think that these few changes would make for a much simpler overall design that would invite an easier way for users to navigate through the website.