Author: Aaron The Great Krol

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Thoughts on Interaction Design: Chapters 3, 4, and 5

  • What information can ethnographic tools give you to improve the interactivity of an online banking website?
  • At what point is a design finished? What makes it a success? What is its purpose?
  • Identify a product family you use regularly. How has its branding effected your use, relationship and experience with the product?
  1. By using ethnographic tools one can gather information on what users of an online banking website do and why they do it. By learning more information about the website’s users one can easily make changes to improve the interactivity of the banking website.
  2. Design is finished when the product is ready to be marketed. Design is considered a success when the product becomes a functional advocate to humanity. Designs purpose is to “create usable, useful and desirable creations”.
  3. A product family that I regularly use are the Apple Iphones. The Iphone’s branding has helped attach me to the product due to the luxurious easy to use marketing appeal.

 

 

 

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Objectified

“Objectified” is a feature length documentary about the role that objects play in our everyday lives while also examining the creative people who design them. Each designer interviewed talked about the importance of the design process and how it effects ones everyday life. At first I thought it was a little ridiculous of the designer’s to stress how important the design process is until I thought about it. It wasn’t until I realized that every object I use everyday had to have been designed by someone with the intent to satisfy the user that I started to agreed with the designers. The designers definitely helped me change the way I think about design as well as gain more respect for the people designing today. First off I had no idea how important subjects such as Sociology, Psychology, and Philosophy were in the design field. “Objectified” taught me that design is so much more than creating objects, but understanding people and how they interact with the world around them. Before watching “Objectified” I would have defined design as the process it takes to turn a idea into a physical object. Now I would define design as the overall process of studying how people interact to create an object that meets the aesthetic, functional, economic, and sociopolitical needs of the consumer. Overall “Objectified” helped me to understand the real need for designers in todays society.

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Thoughts on Interaction Design Ch1-2

1.What makes interaction design and what are some of the industries challenges.

Interaction design is a process that deals with the technical aspect of interaction to create a narrative. Some of the industries greatest challenges consist of a lack of communication among artists and keeping up with the ever increasing technology of today. With out proper communication among artists it makes it difficult for creativity and ideas that would potentially enhance a product to spread. With technology advancing at a rapid pace designers are challenged to make products that will sustain instead of become obsolete.

2.What is interaction design, how is it evolving. What fields does it draw knowledge from.

Interaction design is the process of developing a product or object that stimulates the user is any way, while also analyzing how users might interact with said product. Interaction design is a process that deals heavily with the behavior of humans in an effort to better understand their needs and how to effectively meet their needs. Due to their concerns with humanity subjects such as psychology, sociology and philosophy are fields commonly drawn from in the interaction design world.

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Week1 Questions

  1. The goals of apple’s website is to offer as much information a new and or existing user would need to help them find a product that best suites their lifestyle all while having a luxurious, user friendly feel. For first time Mac book purchasers Apple’s website offers information on all of their products while directing customers to Apple stores for further assistance.
  2. Facebook’s wall offers a numerous amount of features such as a timeline where your “friends” posts can be seen as well as a “share a post” option where one can share information that will appear on their “friends” timeline. It also gives you news updates, weather updates and various other articles that might interest the user.
  3. Sequential Structure: Pacsun’s website when trying to purchase an item uses a sequential structure to follow when checking out items.
  4. Organizing Principles: A movie theaters website that has options to pick “movie times”, “movies”, “ratings” ect
  1. Language and Metadata: BestBuy’s site uses common language to list the name of the product as well as price, type of product and other information the user might want.
  2. Team roles and Process: any data analytics website which helps with making buisness decisions or purchaseing decisions.

 

  1. Huffington post: Navigation 50% Content 50% (a lot of navigation able content)

Google: Navigation 90% Content 10%

Wikipedia: Navigation 70% Content 30%

Etsy: Navigation 80% Content 20%

 

  1. By using giant text, images and bright colors landor.com is able to guide the viewers eyes to the important information.
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Review #4

www.alleghenycreperie.com Review #4

 

For my final review I decided to critique aspects of Allegheny Creamery and Crepes, a local restaurant from my hometown. Upon visiting the Creameries website the first thing I noticed was how simple the layout is. The layout consists of a heading, a menubar, pictures, store hours, utilities on the top and bottom all centered in the middle of the page. The Creameries webpage has very little color consisting of primarily white with black text and pink buttons. It is obvious that the site relies heavily upon their pictures for aesthetic value. As far as navigation goes it is extremely easy to navigate the webpage due to the menu bar having “you are here” markers. The website also does a great job at directing the viewers eye to the navigation bar because the navigation bar contains the only color besides pictures of the food items. The Creameries website also lacks texture, besides the use of lines to create space between the heading and content there isn’t much going on.

When comparing The Allegheny Creamery and Crepe’s website to our website A La Shibab, the first thing that stands out is the fact that we have a warm color scheme making A La Shibab’s website more aesthetically pleasing to the user. Also A La Shibab’s webpages should feel more interactive with animations helping to navigate users eyes to important information. As for layout both webpages will offer a similar centered layout with a menu bar on the top, utilities and hours on the bottom. Although the Creamery and Crepes website does it job by showing necessary information A La Shibab not only shows necessary information, but does a better job at presenting it.

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Review #3

A review on http://sixpennkitchen.com/ and http://no9park.com/.

Six Penn Kitchen’s has simple yet aesthetically pleasing homepage. Sixpennkitchen.com not only offers aesthetic value with it’s simple color scheme, but also offers a user friendly navigation system due to its utilities on the top and bottom of the homepage. As far as balance goes Six Penn Kitchen’s webpages each offer the same centered style, pictures, and easy to read fonts that also makes it extremely easy to find what your looking for. The website effectively uses green text to emphasize and successfully direct the users eyes to important information. Also when using the navigation system the users place is held with a “You Are Here” indicator, which helps the user not get lost while searching through Six Penn Kitchen’s website.

No. 9 Park’s website offers an elegant design with its information laid out in the center of it’s pages creating a nice balance between the right and left margins. Navigating no9park.com is made simple with it’s local navigation and utilities on the left side, which also remains stagnant while exploring the various pages. Another pleasing aspect on No. 9 Parks website is that each page has a page name as well as a “you are here” indicator making it easy to navigate while maintaining its fancy design.

Both Six Penn Kitchen’s and No.9  Park’s website offer similar color schemes with the same centered layout. Although No.9 Park’s pictures help give the website a more elegant feel, Six Penn Kitchen’s website is more visually pleasing and does a better job of directing the users eye to important information. However both websites are easy to navigate due to there navigation bars and “you are here” indicators, but No.9 Park’s website does a poor job of emphasizing important information. Both websites use the same color scheme and for the most part the same layout unifying their webpages. Overall Six Penn Kitchen and No.9 Park are extremely identical with a few differences in layout, but Six Penn Kitchen’s website offers easier to navigate pages and colors that draw the eye to important information better.

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Web Review #2

While searching for a one page website to write my review on I stumbled across a website named “Scroll For Your Health”. Although it caught my eye among a list of websites due to it’s blandness, upon visiting I quickly realized that it’s far from bland. “Scroll For Your Health” initially doesn’t offer aesthetic value besides giants white words with a solid black background that reads scroll for your health and some small different colored ribbons bordering the webpage. The ribbons turned out to be interactive and when clicked on they redirect the user to other sites that have nominated, mentioned, or criticized “Scroll For Your Heath”. I found this to be an extremely good idea allowing me to read up on what other people thought of the website. After reading a pleather of good reviews I decided to scroll through the website and find out what all the hype was about. As you scroll down, div shapes begin to fall into place to create pictures of various fruit and facts about the fruits appear in the upper right corner. Each fruit has a selected color that matches such as red for strawberries, orange for oranges and yellow for bananas. Although the site is extremely well made and teaches healthy food fact through an interesting interactive way, the site could use some improvements. First off there are only three facts about each food, I personally would find it more interesting if there were more facts for each food. Also I think it would be cool if the fruit pictures were interactive in the sense that if you clicked on one it would redirect you to something like more pictures of the selected fruit. Besides more content for the viewer to read “Scroll For Your Health” is extremely fun to play with and definitely gives me a few ideas for my own website.

 

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Review 1

New Egg

Lately I’ve been looking to buy a second 23inch Asus monitor for my laptop so I decided to review newegg.com. Although I was able to find the exact monitor I was looking for, I think the website could be more visually appealing. While first arriving on newegg I noticed the calm color scheme and easy to navigate search options. However when I scrolled down the interesting color scheme completely vanished and I was left looking at the best selling items surrounded by a clutter of ads. Although the blandness of the web page and the ads littered throughout don’t make newegg that visually appealing it more than makes up for it with its indepth search options. First I started my search by using the navigation bar conveniently placed at the top of the webpage. While I knew exactly the requirements I wanted, I started by searching 23inch monitors. This brought me to a page filled with various 23inch monitors, but what was impressive was the amount of specifying search options the left side of the page had to offer. Some of the helpful search options were the manufacturer, condition, price, seller, customer rating and many more. Overall I was able to find exactly what I was looking for due to newegg’s advanced and various search options. However, because of the mass amounts of ads and interactive items on newegg, the webpage could use improvements directing the users focus on where it needs to be.