Sunday, April 4, 2010
Why do we need to do web testing and evaluation?
Web Evaluation – Focus more on non technical part, outcome.
- Website effectiveness: First, you should measure effectiveness in terms of visitors’ experiences on your website. For example, you can measure how many people visit your site, how satisfied they are, and how well they’re able to accomplish what they want. The jargon for this kind of measurement is “Web metrics” or “Web analytics.” Read more about different types of website evaluation.
- Achievement of agency mission: Second, you should measure the impact of your website on achievement of your agency’s mission. These performance measures address the extent to which your agency is achieving its mission specifically because of its website. Read more about tying evaluation to agency mission.
This week every group had presented their 40% of project in front of class. From there we can do some correction based on comments from Dr J and other fellow friends. Dr J gave us an evaluation form to make our own comments on the presentation for each group.
We supposed to present our 40% of project this week. But we postponed it to next week. So today we have lectured as usual and today’s topic is Visual Design in website.
Visual design means that the planning on how your website will look like. You must consider the color, font or styles, graphic and multimedia that you will use on your website. Last but not least you must find the way how all of these elements will be combined or arrange into an attractive layout.
There are several elements of user interface such as
- · Background that reflect the theme
- · Foreground elements that reflect the theme
- · Other elements (text, images, buttons, animation, etc) that support the theme
When you choose the typography, make sure it simple and readable for user.
There are some tools that we use in visual design to help us see more the design for a first start.
Thumbnails Sketches - Help designer think about the visual aspects of the web pages they are designing and help make choices about web site’s presentation design.
Storyboard vs Thumbnails Sketches?
Storyboard – helps on web site’s interaction.
Thumbnails – help to focus on how web pages will look.
Rough Sketches - Usually choose 2 or 3 of the thumbnails to develop further. This more developed sketch is called rough sketches. More carefully drawn – proportions are more accurate.
What is good design? It’s a seemingly simple question that’s surprisingly difficult to answer. The more you think about it, the more complex the question becomes. Not only does “good design” mean different things to different people, it also changes at different times and in different contexts.
Some of the world’s leading designers were challenged to define what “good design” means now in a debate at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. At the debate, which I moderated, each designer was asked to identify one example of “good” and one example of “bad” design, and to explain the reasons for the choices. What did they come up with?
Please go to this site to read more..it such a good writing..
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/defining-good-or-bad-design/
This week we learned about Interaction Design..hmm..what does it mean by Interaction Design. Why don't we go trough some definition first to get some brief idea about the topic.
This definition of interaction from Dix et al. is representative of these texts, and the field:
By interaction we mean any communication between a user and computer, be it direct or indirect. Direct interaction involves a dialog with feedback and control throughout the performance of the task. Indirect interaction may involve background or batch processing. The important thing is that the user is interacting with the computer in order to accomplish something. (Dix et al., 1998, p. 3)
Interaction Design got related to the interactivity. Interactivity in a computer products means that the user, not the designer, controls the sequence, the pace, and most importantly, what to look at and what to ignore.
The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments or the web. Of late, many web applications have reflected a lack of understanding of many of these principles of interaction design, to their great detriment. Because an application or service appears on the web, the principles do not change. If anything, applying these principles become even more important.
Anticipation, Autonomy, Color Blindness, Consistency, Default, Efficiency of the user, Explorable interfaces and etc.
Go to AskTog site to get more info. Hope it will add some new knowledges to u guys..!!
Saturday, April 3, 2010
