Unit 3 Reading

“People won’t use your Website if they can’t find their way around it”

It’s the quote in the beginning of the chapter. I can imagine that the writer want to notice us – the designer – to design their website so that the user can find their way and know where they can go back or forth when they surfing your website.  The writer explains the chapter by using way finding system in real stores. You can imagine that there must be a multi-level in a way finding system. First level is the Company logo/company name/Site ID placed on the top of the page. Next level nav is called section which contains the main links to go to the main sections of the department. Besides, the third level nav which is called tertiary contains the utilities. In my opinion, it looks convenient for the user when they want to use any utilities such as: search, faq, help, form fill, sign up, store locator. So the users don’t have to browse around the website to find the desire site. Also, each section or subsection should have its page title that is correspond to the link name in order to indicate for the user know where they are.With a well-organized navigation system, the customers/viewers can figure out the way to the place without getting lost because of confusing navigation system.

Reference links:

30 Exceptional CSS Navigation Techniques
100 Great CSS Menu Tutorials 
40 Premium CSS Menu and Navigation Solutions 
55 Wonderful CSS Navigation Menu Designs
Showcase Of Beautiful Vertical Navigation Designs

P2_ Inspiring Website

http://www.danbrown.com/#books-section

http://teddekker.com/

http://jeanienefrost.com/night-huntress-world-books/first-drop-of-crimson/

Unit 2 Reading

Chapter 3:

According to researching about people’s psychology, we know that people often scan things first then they will read the most important thing. So a web designer should know the gestalt principles to control the flow of his website so that the users can figure out things easily. First of all, he needs to create an obvious visual hierarchy to show the most important things by modify and organize things into related groups without making users misunderstand. Although elements are organized well in a site, it could make the site boring and everything looks similar, so it couldn’t invite people to click on what they want to go next. Therefore, the convention in a page is very important. It’s very helpful to make user don’t spend a lot of time to think about how this site or this section working. It’s hard to create a new way to convent and design well as a same time. It depends on how your new layout works better or not. Besides, divide remarkable areas to clear the user’s vision so that they can focus on what most important area in order to click on the next link they want to go.  Finally, noisy background is an enemy without well-design website. It will compete the site’s content obviously and make users feel uncomfortable when they scanning that site. The alternative solution is reducing the opacity of the background or change to a clean background so that it couldn’t compete the content on that area.

Link to reference: 

How to Use Visual Hierarchy in Web Design

Chapter 4:

“It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice.” is what Krug expect web designer to minimize the mind of user’s choice when they face with more than one possible option.  Web designer need to name or label and remove the similar options that can confuse the user so that they can click to select that option without mind.

Link to reference:

How Web Design Choices Can Improve - Or Destroy - Your Web Site's Conversion Rates

Chapter 5:

Once again, people don’t read, they just scan. So we need to remove and reduce the unnecessary words that people don’t read. In fact, there are two kind of writing that always concern to this issue, happy talk and instructions.  Happy talk is like “welcome to” sentence or small talk that self-promotes itself about the current site. But it’s very useless because user don’t read it. They just focus on the main content of the page like visual elements. Also, a long instruction makes web user feeling bored when they want to reach the real site’s contents/ functions.  The solution is to reduce the useless words and organize the writing so that the rest content after reducing still works and be acceptable to invite the user to read.

Link to reference:

5 Tips to Simplify Your Web Design

Search Engine Optimization & Website Marketing Do it Yourself or Get Help Now!

Week#1_Reading assignment

Chapter 1:

As an introduction, Steve explains me the reason why his book named "Don't make me think". It's because an attractive website is really working when the users can click on the link/navigation/button right on the first view without asking himself/herself. The problem is the designers use weird/cute/odd link names to describe the button function. That makes users have to think what this button function is. The resolution is designer have to design and name the link button and the content so that the users can figure out easily without self-asking.

Chapter 2:

According to psychology, people usually skim the content first, then they will follow the content. The first thing viewer sees is the big picture or content. That really attract viewer's attention most. And also, people in Western usually read from left-to-right. So designers need to design the big things (links) to get viewer's attention. More over, gestalt principles are really necessary for web designing. Also, web designer need to design his site so that when the viewer scan the site and click the link right away without figuring out how this site work; don't let people have a lot of noisy choices, the most reasonable options are always on the top of the sidebar or sub-link list. The following picture from infohio.com site that describing the area people skim and click first. The red area is the most attractive area that people usually focus on.

Why Moodboard Matters?

Why designers use moodboard for their designing procedure? Why is it important?
The moodboard exposes the designer's brainstorming. In the first process, designer just has the simple ideas. So the moodboard helps designer develops  their basic ideas.Related images,color layout and style are also important because designers don't know what they do next for their design. Typography is always the last thing we need to apply in designing process. If don't have moodboard, the design couldn't develop their site better. Moodboard is considered as a source of a lot of ideas.

Project#1_Sketches

Project 1 - Inspiration

http://benthebodyguard.com/index.php

I like this page much, it use vertical parallax effect to describe the man walking along the street. It is an Apple app that protect user passwords and information. The Home page is clean and readable.

 http://35mmdesign.com/
I like this website concept that it's looking neatly and clean. Also the navigation is attractive, simple, recognizable. When we scroll the page down, the navigation will be shrunk smaller to yield for the content down there. So it does not compete the content and viewer can focus more on the content.

http://grabandgo.pt/grab.html#go=1
I considered this site as my conceptual project. It use horizontal parallax not like most of the site using vertical parallax. Also, in this site, when we hover or moving the mouse, the background will follow the cursor's movement. It looks simple and readable.

Project#1 _ Moodboard

Testing

testing