Week8B

Today in class we had to do card sorting. I started out by doing other people's cards. At first it was confusing to have to put them into so many categories and figure out where things go. By the third one I got the hang of it.

The first person I had sort my cards sorted them according to the type of meat. Each mear had a few cards along with those pertaining to that meat. There was a cookbook category with recipes and cooking tips. Another category was combination packs with all of the meat packages you can get.  Another was special deals with wholes/quarters and the bargain barn. Contact and email, shopping cart.

The second person sorted the cards into the types of meats, elk, buffalo, cooking, contact, info about meat, deals/shopping cart, other foods.

The third person that went categorized the cards into the types of meat each with all meat information in that category, meat selections, combinations, deals, and a category of miscellaneous food/ items.

After observing these I think my favorite approach was the thirds. It had  all of the meats categorized into their meat and anything that fell under that type of meat. To me this seemed the most logical because the categories seemed much clearer to me.

Week8A

Today in class we talked about the different content audits people made. We went over the site and answered 4 questions based on the site and the content. We then got into smaller groups where we talked about individual sites.  Here are some of my additions:
1. more content: shopping cart, bakery items, special deals, books, dog food, dog toys, recipes, seasoning.
2.  The content is mostly organized by a home page with secondary and tertiary links. There are categories on the home page which organize the content.
3. There is no inclination as to who created it but it seems like it might be in house because the images and text seem like they were from this company and the site can be updated by the owner.
4. I think this lives on one server with multiple pages. There are only maybe 2 external links so it all seems like it's coming from the same source.

After that we talked about card sorting. We took our site and wrote down the different pages (main and sub navigation). We are writing them down to get a feel for what the user might do when organizing your content. We will eventually switch with other class members and sort their cards by putting them into categories we think are necessary to organize the content.  I have about 50 or so cards.

Week7 Outside of Class/Spring Break

Outside of class I worked on finishing my content audit. I found it very frustrating because the information was all over the place. There were links that were on the site about 50 times. It doesn't make sense for a user to be that confused while using the website.
4 points:
Content- On the site I chose the content is meat products. Most of the products are deer, goat, buffalo and elk products for anyone that wants to buy it. You can get packages shipped to your house. There are also recipes that you can follow using the different meats you can buy.
Organization- Mostly all of the links are on the first page and it is organized by meat type. They are organized by gift packs, frozen meat, and processed meats.
Created By- I think whoever created this site knew a lot about the type of meat they had and the product but not much about design and user experience. They had no knowledge of how confusing it might get for the user when they come to a site like this. Signal and cue are lost in this site.
Where it lives-I think when it comes to where does the content live I might guess that this site is on one server with many different pages. There aren't a lot of off site page sources so I would say most of the content is html.

Week7B

In class we used the website that we found to start a content audit. I started working on my content audit color coding and numbering so that the information can be found easily. I am in the process of finishing the cotent audit. So far I've only made it through about 1/4 of the navigation on the home page.

Week7A

This week in class we discussed the reading assignment and why User Experience is important. We had a few people show their examples of bad websites where the content is hard to find and all jumbled throughout the pages. I am going to do a content audit based off of the first website I found.

http://www.elkusa.com/index.html

 Here are some pictures of the website I'm going to use. The links have different signals and are laid out everywhere. There is no clear navigation and information is just plopped on the page.

Week6 Outside of class

http://www.elkusa.com/

Elkusa

http://www.warrencountykustoms.com/index.html

Kustoms

http://goodrichjumps.com/index.html

jumps

Outside of class I worked on finding three websites that are horribly designed and laid out. The ones that I found have information everywhere and there's no clear navigation. This first one I found has links all over the place. Everything is jumbled together and I would have no idea where to go to find the information I would want to find. The text is also all different sizes and the body paragraph is too large when I scroll down. The second one I found has images on top of images that are just so confusing. Boxes are just placed everywhere in the wrapper and some of the text is off. There are javascripts that don't work. The third website I found has horrible primary colors. The text is squished in the box for navigation. It basically has a normal document flow. Other than color, there really is no css treatment to make it all look better.

Week6B

I was not in class yesterday because I was sick. I know what we need to do. LeAnne told me that we need to find 3 websites that have bad links, content and are just unorganized and be able to present them to the class. We also need to read a magazine on Smashing Magazine about user experience.

Week6A

Today in class we had a full critique on each final layout of the flowcharts. Our group talked first. I talked about the different reasons why we did the things we did and why we put things in certain places. I explained that the layout was important, the color scheme was important and the flowcharts we chose added to the user's knowledge of hockey. I also explained that the visuals we had let the viewer know about equipment and the different penalties without making text explanations. We talked about what was working with our final layout and what wasn't.

Week5 Outside of Class

Outside of class we wrapped up our flowchart. We fixed errors that we found on it and we moved things around to make the overall feel better. Before things just seemed placed anywhere but we took some time to think about what to put where. We also talked about who is going to talk on Monday. Jared is going to talk about the flow of the game. I'm gonna talk about the reasons behind what we did and Devin is going to talk about the process of getting to this final flowchart.