Week 9 - Feedback via Interactive web-form pages

Designing a condensed interactive web page is a highly important characteristic which surprisingly not really emphasized by Jakob Neilsen’s main articles on web usability guidelines. Limiting the length of this survey page to about a page and a half in length of standard letter-size pages, while making sure the web-page remains highly usable, is essential to encouraging feedback, since longer surveys really discourage people from completing surveys. The length of this page was limited significantly by transforming from a vertical listing of five-to-eight lines of check-box answers and Likert-Scale radio button selections per question, into only two horizontal lines per question. Rather than asking a broad range of questions on interactive usability criteria, these questions integrate usability specifications with the characteristics of my web-pages, rather than asking open-ended philosophical questions and soliciting other important information.

In addition to including two one-sentence tag-lines summarizing the purpose of this survey page, a brief window title, this page’s layout emphasizes a clear starting and ending point, along with providing a little box where I can type so visitors are able to express information s/he believes is of high importance. In terms of revealing site content, while this web form page was not intended to “show examples of real site content” (which would have lengthened this page significantly), this web-form provides relevant words hyperlinked directly to specific key pages, offering easily locatable item access to each weekly web page and to my Photoshop Tutorial.

This web-forms visual design enhances interactive design, in addition to Readability. All the plain font are at least twelve-point size, and the font color-contrast is high, so the yellow and blue color text stands-out from the black background. The raised-embossed and inset embossed (increased by five) font, along with increased (by twenty) spread between the lines of font, make the especially large text stand-out from the white graphics and yellow banner background, which help increase readability.

The table format, with a recognizable white outline box and border outline, stands out from the black page background along with from the yellow and blue colored font, which helps users focus attention on each individual question. In addition, this outline design helps users navigate from one question to another, denoting each question’s starting and ending point. This web-form page does not have meaningless, frivolous, or irrelevant images or stock art; it emphasizes feedback with three talking icons in the banner. This banner (created in Fireworks MX 2004) not only decorates this web-page but also serves as a non-verbal indication of interest in user feedback, in addition to the words stating the same importance.

User feedback may be effectively utilized to collect patron contact information (name, phone number, e-mail address, street address, etc) and store it digitally in a standardized format. This reduces the financial expense of hiring people to open envelopes of information received in a mailbox or speak with patrons in person or over the phone, in order to process this information. This information can be uploaded to a central database so that organizations can efficiently send information to patrons by e-mail or mail, and so patrons can log into accounts set-up by the organization.

Week 8 - Flashy vs. Usability

The first thought while reading Jakob Neilsens Flash: 99% bad, was contemplating the last time I actually desired to sit through a Flash animation, when the website’s focus was not specifically oriented toward visual imagery. Unlike website photo galleries of abandoned buildings like Danvers State Insane Asylum and Hours of Darkness, I could not recall of a single website Flash introduction page when my first impulse was not to locate and click on with my mouse the (skip intro) link. Surprisingly, Mr. Neilsen did not mention about poorly designed Flash pages, where it is incredibly hard to click on the (skip intro) and navigation links, along with incompatibility with the Netscape web browser. In addition, Mr. Neilsen did not discuss digital divide problems back in year 2000, with old slower computers, many without current Flash software, along with slow dialup access to large size page downloads, which make accessing these flash-page harder to nearly impossible.

To summarize Mr. Neilsen’s fundamental message throughout the article, most Flash webpage designers seem to be prioritize (style over substance), in which more attention is paid to webpage appearance over providing greater access to information. In application, these practices continues previously mentioned (nasty usability issues), resulting in problems with webpage browsing navigation and tracking, visibility of text, accessibility to persons with disabilities, along with impeding the utility of translation and searching for words. In essence, Mr. Neilsen argues most Flash webpage designers seem to create web-pages which are not appropriately designed for the people interacting with websites, and designers focus on creating attractive animations and toolbars detract from the websites core purpose.

For this assignment I made several modifications to the original Blogger profile photo.

Using Photoshop CS2, I drew two rectangles with the rectangle tool on the lower left window, repeatedly applying the paint bucket tool with black swatch until the lights and reflections from outside the house were removed from the window. Then I increased the brightness by 20 on each space. I then reduced the size of the photo from the original enormous size to a 480 pixel width by a 352 pixel height, for the recommended width for posted images into a table.

With the oval tool in Fireworks MX 2004, I drew a gray colored moon with a 100% oil-slick texture, so it would appear close to what the moon’s actual surface looks like. This moon was saved as a png file, and then imported into Flash MX 2004. For the planet Mars, I drew a smaller planet with an orange-reddish color, and applied a 51% oil-slick texture. This planet was then saved as a png file and imported into Flash MX 2004. I also drew a star with the star-tool, and then saved it as a png file to be imported into Flash MX 2004. I did not import other stars I created from the original, and utilized the free-transform tool to stretch and rotate them.

I drew the rectangle with Flash MX 2004, then utilized the timeline to insert a keyframe at the 40th frame. The transform tool was applied to create a motion and a shape tween, rotating the rectangle 360 degrees counter clockwise with a motion ease of 70 to slow at the end. Similar motion and shape tween modifications were applied to the quote of Ralph Waldo Emerson, except the text rotated clockwise and had a motion ease of 50 to slow at the end. Font styles Verdana, Arial, Courier New, and Italicized Times New Roman was applied to a sequence of words in the quote, to shape tween the text. Text was inserted into rectangle toolbar buttons at the 40th frame, then the (Go to Web Page) behavior was applied, with hyper links to the stated pages.