Chris Hall Blog #9

Chapter seven and theme #4 of the seven themes of good design seem to take two separate approaches to achieve a similar goal. Theme #4 of the seven themes of good design talks about the ease of learning, not making the user feel overwhelmed, and elevating the user to their next level of expertise. Chapter seven, as its title suggests, talks about uniformity, consistency and meaning, which in theory will aid in theme #4’s goal of ease of learning. A good example of these concepts that I found was phonescoop.

The reason this site is a good example is it follows many of the rules and suggestions laid out in chapter seven regarding design and consistency. Right off the bat you notice that there are not very many colors on the site (with the exception of the advertisements). This site also follows the rules about alignment in the sense that entire site is contained inside a single columns which is broken down into smaller columns. The site also follows chapters sevens notion of consistency, in that the banner at the top and the side bar navigation are the same size and in the same place throughout the site.

While some might say that this site feels a little too crowded, and violates the notions of proportion that are discussed in chapter seven, once a user starts to explore the site they find out that most of that crowded feeling is due to the large amount of actual content and not design elements such as logos, navigation bars, and advertisements (with the exception of the one just below the banner).Over all I feel this site is a great example for the ideas of ease of learning as well as consistent design.