Author: HarrisonKlehm

• What are the goals of Apple’s website? How does Apple’s website address the needs of a user who has just purchased their first MacBook?

This website is very modern and well-designed and helps users find the information they need easily. It seeks to aid users in finding the best product for them, while also seeking to have them upgrade and buy accessories as needed.

• What are the functional specifications of your preferred social media’s home page? If you are not on social media what are the specs for google?

On Twitter, the functional specifications rely mostly on allowing the user to browse a feed. Unlike some other social media, the home page of Twitter brings you instantly to a feed. It then must allow you various other options, such as posting immediately from the homepage, making an account if you do not have one, and viewing other tabs for other exploration. Overall, most of the functions rely on scrolling and viewing other people’s posts, and most of the features revolve around that.

• What are four architectural approaches to information design and organization? Find one example of each.

Organic Structure: wikipedia.com

Hierarchial Structure: rmu.edu

Matrix Structure: amazon.com

Sequential Structure: kotaku.com

• What percentage of The Huffington Post index page is navigation, and what percentage is content? What about Google, Wikipedia, and Etsy?

The Huffington Post brings you immediately to content and has very few points of navigation. The first image is a huge header for an article, and then there are many smaller images for many other articles.

Google’s home page is only navigation. The first sight is a search bar, to which you might enter what you are searching for. It may also recommend familiar sites to you as you have used them before.

Wikipedia is also heavily based on navigation with a search bar being most present, though it also has more content upon scrolling down.

Etsy, though it has a large search bar on top, immediately brings you to content even if you are not a returning user. The main goal is to sell you things, and the content comes immediately.

• How does http://landor.com guide the readers’ eyes and focus their attention on what is important? 

The website starts with a big image and display, and the display does not leave until you scroll far down. It makes the user force their attention on the starting image. As you scroll down, content takes a second to arrive as it fades in from white, so the audience must really pay attention to see the content or they will scroll right past it.

1. Ethnographic tools assist in helping us designers understand how our consumers use our products. By using these tools, we gain information on the steps our consumers take, what is analyzed by them, and if our intended goal is occuring. From this information, for an online banking website, we can learn how to streamline the process and make it easy to understand. We can see if some steps are not needed and can be removed, or if some steps are made unclear and would be frustrating to consumers. With the importance of banking, it is essential that the website is clear and easy to interact with, and ethnographic tools can assist us with that.
2. A design is not finished after the product is made, but after it has been tested and the intended results occur. As designers, we can try our best to make a design we think consumers may find easy to use, but we are biased from experience and may percieve a process to be simple when a consumer would actually find it very difficult. A design is only finished when our intended result works as intended, when the consumer can use our design as we hope they would. Our design is successful, then, when we can make one that the consumer can truly understand properly.
3. A product family I use regularly would be the Pepsi product family. I tend to consume its products a lot, especially Pepsi and Mt. Dew. I see its products everywhere, and in my past I have seen marketing for it a lot. Whenever I think I need energy in the middle of my university day, I immediately just think of Mt. Dew since I tend to rely on its caffeine so much. Overall, its branding has developed a bit of a dependency on it for me, and I choose it very often over other products, even coffee.

Interaction design is made of several fields, drawing from graphic design, UI/UX design, web design, and even psychology. Unlike the design-related fields, Interaction Design is less about appearance and more about function. It handles the challenge of experts not properly understanding how someone inexperienced with the material may interact with it. It requires an understanding of the process used by those who are intended to use it. An experienced interaction designer must attempt to view their functions through the eyes of someone new to the content instead of themself because someone experienced will not experience the same troubles a new person would. Though this can be done through self-testing and a plain understanding of others, one evolved method of interaction design testing is creating prototypes and having others test them. It’s growing ever more important to understand how an audience interacts with a product, and it’s especially important to understand how different types of people act too, as everyone has a separate experience. Interaction design, then, is an invaluable asset to any design or product to add easy functionality to everything. Skipping this process may lead to extremely faulty designs, making it essential to modern design.