Week 8 SPRING BREAK

This week was spring break and our only assignment was to finish the audit we started in class last thursday. I took a lot of time to get everything down on my audit from the Candy Lady site. Going through it I found myself getting very frustrated because so many links were repeating and the navigation was just so long and confusing. I finally finished and here is the last few lines on my audit. 

I found my key to be very important because I did have so  many repeating links and cross links that it would be very confusing if I didn't use a color system of some kind. 

I also had a few questions that I needed to answer about my site based from the audit I created. 

1. What content do you have?

The home page is simply just an introduction to The Candy Lady and how she got started. From there it goes in many different directions all linking to different (and sometimes the same) pages for types of candy. The other content that is on the site deals with publicity. She has facebook links and links to videos as well as articles about the shop.

2. How is the content organized?

Mostly the content is organized by type of candy. The biggest problem with the site is the repeating candy in different links. There are also many links that take you to the same page. This makes the links spread out in so many different sections making the main nav very large and hard to follow.

3. Who creates the content?

I am assuming that the content is created by the owner. All of the information is about the candy, the price and also the quantity of the product. Also in the publicity section they seem to be outside articles written about the Candy lady company and news videos doing the same type of stories. There is also a facebook link that content is sometimes created by the user in the form of comments. With the candy there are some pieces that I believe are not created in-house and then the information about that type of candy could possibly be out-sourced. The shopping cart is something else that I noticed is not created in-house. It was supplied by Mal's Ecommerce site.

4. Where does the content live within the technical infrastructure?

The majority of the site like I stated before is mostly the candy so they are all within sections of different types of candy. There are only a few external links that would take you to the facebook page, or to youtube. The shopping cart also is an external link powered by the Ecommerce site. 

Overall the site isn't too hard to find what you are looking for because it has such a vast main navigation. For some people though this could get confusing because of the repeating items in different links. The problem now becomes, if you found something once, how do you find it again? 

Week 7.2

Today in class we had time to start on our audits of the site we chose I decided to go with the Candy lady site. It really is a horribly designed site with no sense of organization at all which became even more evident once I started my audit. As you can see in the visuals below, there are a lot of links just in the home page. It took me all class just to get through the links that are just on the home page. Many of which repeat and go to the same page. I also came across another problem, since the site is for a candy shop, there are a lot of different products and all lead the the same place (a shopping cart) most pages get very repetitive like the thanksgiving page seen below.

Week 7.1

Today in class we went over the websites we found last class and I realized that mine were not as disorganized as badly as I thought. I took time today to find sites that truly are disorganized and need help with the user experience. Here are just a few sites that I am thinking about using. They have a lot of links and not a very clear navigational system.

http://thecandylady.com/index.php

http://www.public.navy.mil/bupers-npc/Pages/default.aspx

http://www.clmech.com/index.htm

Outside Class Week 6

This weekend out of class assignment was to read the Smashing Magazine article What is User Experience Design? I found this article very interesting. A lot of the information was a review from other articles or books we have read in class. However, the most interesting thing I found was in the criticisms of UX as a profession. Something I never thought about was that people believe that UX designers are too far removed from the process. This is so by UX designers that have no background in the process of building webpages and can't devise solutions. I feel that this could be a very large debate amongst the web community and I wondering just how much of a difference this makes in web design. I found also the many website suggestions at the end of the article very helpful and possibly useful one day. Some of those are as followed...

http://www.uxbooth.com/

http://ux.stackexchange.com/

http://uxmag.com/

Week 6.2

Today in class we got our next project. We are going to create a document that includes all the research to redesign a site. This consists of studies, research, card sorting, audits or current sites, personas, etc. The end product will be a 11x8.5 document that is well designed including images and type that describes our findings. Our task in class today was to find poorly designed webpages that have too many links and are hard to navigate/ find what you are looking for. Below are screen shots of some of the sites i found, along with the links to the site.

http://www.yorkfair.org/index.htm

http://www.martinschips.com/index.htm

 http://www.anniebaileysirishpub.com/

 http://hunger.cwsglobal.org/site/TR/2012FallCROPHungerWalk/TR-Fall2012?fr_id=15349&pg=entry

 

http://www.whiterosebarandgrill.com/

Week 6.1

Today in class we had a final critique on our projects. We mostly talked about our progress and outcome of the flowchart and overall of the process. We started with brainstorming ideas and creating a lot of lists for various things. This is when we decided that football is such a complicated sport and we need to eliminate to only the most important aspects of the game. Next we split up the group each focusing on a different flow chart for a player, the coin toss, or the overall game itself. As a group then we found the best way to explain the sport after much brainstorming. We finally came up with using swim lanes in a stair step pattern to show the downs of a game. Since football is so repetitive it was important that we showed that each down there is the same outcomes and everything eventual ends in a score or a turnover.

Most people thought the flow was done very well and for a complicated sport, we did a nice job explaining the most important things. One comment was about connecting our penalties with visuals of some sort, and alos the player flowcharts stand out. However, this is something that we wanted to do since it is such a player driven sport each with their own responsibilities. The big comment was also on the color scheme. In our defense the colors did print differently on the final piece then on the test print, but I do agree that on the final print they do not scream football. Our main goal in using the colors we did was to stay away from the cliche green field, yellow field posts kind of thing. Like stated in the critique, it really depends on the user and what they perceive from the colors.

Outside of class Week 5

Today Alhannah, Alyssa and I came into the lab to mount our final print out. Yesterday the two of them worked on making any final changes to the design, and got it printed this morning.