Other final concepts Flashcards
(8 cards)
Breadth vs Depth is not quite the same with web design vs something else (something native for example).
-Do you want to have pages that are limited where you have to click more times? Web designers have to think about breadth vs depth differently
○ What is different: Data is stored at a remote location and even some of the processing might be. Imagine that if you clicked on “Edit” on the menu bar it took several seconds for the drop-down list with Copy, Cut, and Paste to appear. The experience would be vastly different, and so the design approaches would be as well.
7±2
Miller’s famous 1950s “7±2” study showed that people’s short-term memory consistently was limited to about 7 things.
This led to many desktop applications having their menus designed to have around 7 top-level options at most, and then on the sub-menus having 7 or fewer options
Navigation -vs- Content
Navigation = necessary evil
Manage negative space and Manage navigation bars/menus/space vs content space
-Navigation is typically required, and advertising is often a requirement, even if that advertising is internal. Screen space is taken up with explicit navigation typically takes away from the actual content.
○ Content is exactly what the user wants to interact with on a website.
* Mapquest site from the 90s
Seller -vs- Buyer
Overall: Can’t always design exactly for the user, must also design for clients and manage tradeoffs.
Banner ads are the prototypical example. Users hate them, marketers require them.
Designers often are on the user’s side, but employed in part to “serve” the marketers. —The best thing you can do is probably to be aware of these tradeoffs, and be able to make informed decisions.
Students brought up SuzanneCollinsBooks.com and Pottermore.com as similar yet different sites.
Twitter as a site doesn’t have a literal buyer and seller. They are selling your data in aggregate form as well as trend info
Download time
Tradeoffs on quality/versatility.
-People have different resources (eg: home vs work vs mobile).
○ Access rates are a moving target.
○ A set of technical issues surrounding the web are those of network bandwidth, page size, and the resulting download times. This is a moving target as we commonly see the content balloon as bandwidth improves, leaving those with lower bandwidth more and more at a disadvantage. You may have experienced this as you work from home rather than on campus.
○ Mobile bandwidth has improved greatly over the past decade but again, this varies based on both locale and socioeconomic status.
Information Scent
-Users hunt for info based on tiny fragments that lead them in the right direction.
○ Support search on page, caption images.
○ Links that look clickable should indeed be clickable.
-Essentially information scent is the place where eyes are drawn.
○ Official definition; Contains distal target information via category labeling ○
Universal accessibility
- Make sure content is accessible to everyone
- Adult vs children hearing/visual/speech impaired
- Expert vs novice users
Screen resolution and density
-The threshold for “good” resolution used to be 1024x768, and while very few non-mobile devices have lower resolution than that, that level of resolution is too low for many web experiences nowadays.
Test different formats
