- Apple’s website serves as both an informational outlet for potential customers to do more research on Apple’s products and software as well as a way for current Apple product users to troubleshoot any problems they may be having with their devices. According to “Elements of the User Experience” by Jesse James Garrett, user needs are important. If a new Mac owner needs help setting up their device or needs assistance on how certain features work, Apple’s website breaks down step by step how to fix the problem. Each device Apple offers has it’s own tab on the homepage which allows users to easily navigate the page to find what information they need. Apple also lets their customers have the option of getting help from an Apple professional straight from their website.
- Facebook’s wall showcase a particular user’s profile picture and general information (education, relationship status, birthday, number of friends, etc.). It also shows what and when the user posts statuses or pictures, shares an article, video, or picture with their friends. The wall is also a platform for other users to post on to send that particular person a public message. The wall is in sequential order and has a scrolling function that allows users to scroll through a person’s activity throughout the week, month, and even year.
- Four types of Architectural Approaches:
- Hierarchy – tgifridays.com (The homepage has options to take you to several different options such as lunch, dinner, and catering. Each of those links then has their own page which take you into the more specific features of that particular section of the website.)
- Matrix – target.com (When searching for products, the user is able to specify exactly what they are looking for by color, size, quantity, etc., and the website narrows the search for you to make it easier to find the products you want.)
- Organic – perezhilton.com (A famous blogger, Perez Hilton formats his webpage so his users can scroll down the page and read article after article, but users have to click all over the place if they are searching for a very specific topic. This, in return, may make it hard to find the same article more than once.)
- Sequential – pinterest.com (Pinterest allows its users to simply scroll freely down the webpage to look at and pin anything they want to their board. It’s very easy to go back and forth between pages if need be but it doesn’t take you all over the place.)
- Huffington Post’s index page is about 10 percent content and 90 percent navigation. The homepage has a navigation bar that will take you basically anywhere on the website as well as tabs that take you to all of their social media pages. It also is filled with pictures and link that take you to all of the articles on the website. This part of the index is also part of the content of the website. Since there are so many articles listed on the homepage, it covers a lot of the recent content on their site. Google on the other hand, is 100 percent navigation. There is no set place that the website will take you; it all depends on what the user wants to search for and what he/she needs. Wikipedia is probably close to 99 percent navigation besides the small amount of text that states who Wikipedia is sponsored by and so forth. Etsy is definitely a content heavy website: 70 percent content and 30 percent navigation. Since most of the content is visible once the user does one singular search, the navigation doesn’t take up most of the surface. These numbers, though, could be interchangeable because the navigation could be related to the content.
- Landor.com has a scrolling feature that focuses on specific aspect at a time. Once the user has read one section of the website and scrolls down, the section previous begins disappear slowly and the new one slowly begins to appear where the old one once was. Once the scroll is complete, the portion of the website that wishes to be active becomes perfectly clear. This makes the website easy to navigate through without having to click all over the place to find things.
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