Ricky Petticord
Week 1 Questions
- The goals of Apple’s website are to communicate the value of their products to potential buyers through sleek, concise layout and navigation and to provide support for existing customers using the same principals. Apple uses user segmentation to break their site into chunks related to specific products and support sections. Apple addresses the needs of a user who just purchased a new macbook by offering a support tab and a search tab alongside tabs for their products on the home page. A user seeking support for their new device has likely been to the site before, and having these sections in a familiar and easy to access section is helpful to the user. From there, a welcoming and understandable page provides several options, with basic information up front and a well designed layout for more experienced users to find the information they need.
- Facebook’s wall is loaded with content and user functions. These include a search feature, scrolling newsfeed with status updates from friends and subscribed pages, a post widget allowing users to share text status updates, photos, videos and pages, a notification panel, messenger, event reminders, trending news stories, event reminders, page manager and an explore feature. These all allow the user to connect with every feature that Facebook offers. Facebook’s signup page is much more basic. If offering new users a sign up field directly from the home page in order to create an account and access content within Facebook.
- The four architectural approaches to information structure are hierarchical, matrix, organic, and sequential. Fonts.com laregly followers a hierarchal structure with a navigation bar holding the site features containing further navigations options when a user selects one. Ebay uses a matrix structure, giving shoppers the ability to filter through different different options to customize their browsing experience. Google uses an organic approach, with a search feature in the center of the page. A user can search, then click through options such as images, and videos or access the account section to move to Maps, the Play Store, Gmail, Drive, and more. Sequential architecture organized information in a step by step approach, and is often used for checkout sequences such as on Amazon, where a user clicks through each page to the next.
- The Huffington Post home page is about 10% navigation and 90% content. The navigation bar rests at the top of the page, and as the user scrolls they are flooded with an endless stream of new stories and opinion pieces. Google is all navigation. A search bar rests neatly on the center of the home page, with some small navigation icons in the upper righthand corner. Wikipedia is similar, offering the user a language choice and a search bar. However, if a user goes directly to the home language page (such as en.wikipedia.org), it is about 10% navigation on the left hand side and all content from there. Wikipedia uses embedded contextual navigation through hyperlinks in the copy of the wiki articles themselves. Etsy’s home page primarily offers all navigation, giving users a selection tools and a hierarchal navigation system to select which category they want to search through.
- Landor.com uses a one page design with bright images, colors, and clean typography to draw the reader in and throughout the page. This approach reduces the possibility that the user will be distracted by some other clutter on the page.