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Don't Make Me Think Chapter Proofs
Chapter 1 and Chapter 4
Both of these chapters are about making the user's experiance effortless. The more the user has to think the more complicated your site becomes. My current aduience is CIT 230 students and the CIT 230 teacher. With this in mind I made a simple navigation with 4 buttons for the 4 main pages. Visit the Home Page and you can see that the button is pressed in to show what page you are on. Also on hovering over the button the button changes color a little to show that it is a link. The navigation is very striaght forward and easy to use.
Chapter 2 and Chapter 3
Deal with scaning text. I cut down on the content on my page to make it much more scanable. The home page has the most text on it besides the individual alertboxes. Visit Alert Box 1 and you will see a summary of the Alert Box article with a list to help make the text more scanable.
Chapter 5
This chapter is about cutting down on needless words. It talks about keep text short and to the point. The internet is about fast information and wordy text should be avoided. I chose to cut as mucht text from my 3 assignment pages so that just the important information was left, which is just the links for the assignments. Visit Projects Page to see a page with nothing but the most important information and minimal noise.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6 is about making navigation simple and easy to use. I have been frustrated with many sites that jumble their navigation. With the lessons of this chapter I decided to keep it as simple as possible. I do not have as many pages as the comerical site do but I divided my website up in the simplist way I could. By looking above on this page you can see the navigation which has the buttons "Home," "Alertbox," "Proofs," and "Projects." Each of these links are for the different categories of assigments that were given to us for CIT 230. Within those pages you can find links to each individual assigment that is named accordingly. The navigation remains in the same place and in the same form for all of the pages which helps users get around the site better. All the pages have names which helps the user know where they are at as well as what is on the page.
Chapter 7
Chapter 7 warns that the home page and how it will never be perfect. With all of the tasks that the home page is needed to do that it can end up very complex if you try to have it do everything perfectly. The one thing that the Home page is needed to do is covay the big picture. My site is a personal website, while I do use it for class right now it will still be my personal site. Vist my Home Page and you will see it is all about me. The heading in the text frame is "About Me." Also in the navigation my name and picture are placed in the heading. All of these things help define my site as a personal site and all of these things you can see from the home page. I tried to keep the colors very simple; they are mainly black, while, and grey. Also, I plan to add a search box into my home page as well as teases, as talked about in the book.
Chapter 8
This chapter is about how to get web design teams to work together even with their differences. I don't have a design team so I don't have anyone to confer with before I make a descion. I do have to worry having a mind set about what users want based off of what I want. I kept the site appearance simple and clean cut. The functionality of the site is very simple as well because that is what I thought that users would want. The new design is untested but I will test as soon as I get a good tag line and add a few more elements to the home page to attract users.
Chapter 9
The focus of chapter 9 deals with usabilty testing and focus groups. I had a small group of people that I talked with about some of the ideas I had for a design and I had them give me some fee back. None of them were very advanced web users and all wanted something that "looked cool with cool features but was simple to use." I had 3 people test my site out and give me their feed back. They all commented that it was extremely striaght forward, but a little boring. I should have done more testing as I was developing the site so I could of designed the site with a little more flare instead of having to think back now on how to make the site I have more interesting looking or re-design it all. Chapter 9 also deals typical problems and how to handle them. Since the site does nothing complicated and is small the issues that came up where in the design being a little boring. No one had anything to say about the functions of the site.
Chapter 11
This chapter talks about accessibility. For my site the font size is changable and the boxes for the text are made to expand with the increasing text. This way my site is more acessible for those with poorer vision. The chapter also recommends using style sheets which I use to help define the the layout of the site. Also to make the page printer friendly I made another style sheet only uses the content of the site and strips away the graphics. You can view both of these style sheets in the CSS view in Firebug.
Chapter 12
The last chapter talks about avoiding pressure from other to make a bad decision on web development or design. My friends have said I should add movies or music or other crazy features that would annoy users after repeated visits or on the first visit or some.