Chris Hall - Blog #3

Because of the nature of Half.com and the fact that, for blog assignment #2, I focused on their search filter/category system some of the techniques that we could ordinarily use just won’t be very effective. However we can still gain a lot of high level information by using simple surveys. Although the basic idea of a survey is quite simple it can also be quite a powerful tool. By using surveys we will be able to gather information such as overall appeal of the system, highest and lowest rated feature, and what is the most often used area. An additional benefit to using surveys (other than the cost) is that we are able to focus the survey to any particular are we choose. The final benefit to using surveys to collect information about users of half.com, is that we can give the subjects freedom to answer and provide as much or as little feedback as they wish while still gaining the important information we are seeking.

Link to Jambase.com

Sorry everyone, I forgot to post the link to my website in my last post.

JamBase--check it out

Blog Assignment 3 - Recommendation

Link : www.google.com

I have chosen www.google.com as my week number two blog assignment. There can be lots of creative techniques to improve the site quality better to help users to understand the website more easily. However, one technique which I believe that would most help better understand users of the Google website is through using surveys. Since the Google website is well-known to lots of web users, and knowing that the site is very simple, using surveys would be better to understand the users of the website than other technique such as shadowing.

Using corner parts of the Google website, since the most of background part are empty, there could be a quick survey link. Surveys can be somtimes very effective for acquiring high-level information, and since lots of people will be using the Google website daily, there will going to be tons of variety results of the surveys. Therefore, surveys can help on gathering users information about how users feel about the website or overall usability of the website.

Blog 3

The most effective way to gain valuable information from users of the "Show Finder" tool on www.jambase.com is through a survey. The survey will help to gain high level information about what critera the users find most helpful, or are the most frequently used. To gain this information the survey will ask users to rate the different criteria based on their frequency of use and overall effectiveness.
Using a survey in this situation is the most beneficial technique to gain information about the "Show Finder" tool on JamBase. Using the contextual inquiry technique would not be possible because there is no way to live and work with the plethora of different types of people who enjoy listening to live music and are trying to find shows in their area. Shadowing would also be ineffective in this situation because there is no "typical" user: a variety of people with different cultural backgrounds, jobs, classes, and interests go to live shows and want to easily be able to find live shows in their area.

William "Tanner" Sheridan

#3 - Understanding Users - Nik Spurgetis

The Fucking Weather is such a simple, straightforward site that only the design-savviest of users will have an actual complex thought regarding its mechanics and presentation. A "stop" at the site may only last for several seconds, and there isn't a lot to interact with, so shadowing would be virtually useless. Surveys could definitely be used in this situation.

The survey could be easily distributed, via another link on the page, perhaps directly underneath the "main content" (the weather readout). The survey could contain questions such as "how many times do you visit the site per day?" "Do you read any of the content the site links to at the bottom of the page?" "Do you find the layout and content easy to navigate/read?" and "How many seconds or minutes, on average, do you spend on each visit to the site?"

Kym Pagel - Blog 3

The website was Wikipedia.
To study the users of this site I think it would be best to use the survey technique. I know, it seems like the easy way out, using surveys, but it's actually one of the few ways listed that I think would be helpful considering the broad amount of users who regularly frequent Wikipedia. It would be hard to shadow or do contextual inquiry because the users come from many different cultural and educational backgrounds.
So, survey technique.
Why do surveys? Because they're quick and they can reach a broad range of people without actually having to "go" anywhere. Also, surveys are pretty cheap. You can make them on a site called SurveyMonkey for free. With a technique like this on such a high traffic site its likely that it will be answered a fair amount, especially if some incentive is offered. An example incentive would be if the survey completion was an entry in a drawing for some Wikipedia swag or other moderately priced item.To further increase the likelihood that the surveys will be completed successfully, the survey will be short and with easy to answer questions.
It's possible to have the survey placed at the entrance of each language from the main page, thus getting a little bit from each of the different languages. The questions can help you learn many things, like which countries visit the most, how users enter the site (through the homepage, search bar, etc), and how often they use the site. This will help the designer know which features of the website are most important, for example which languages to emphasize on the main page.

Shadowing to better understand users of the Apple Support website

The best technique to better understand users of the Apple Support website is shadowing. This technique will be used by selecting a handful of users of the website followed by careful observation of the interaction between the user and the website. This technique is best to better understand users of the website because users can be observed in their natural interaction with the website. Instead of making the user think/state/show what needs to be improved to make the interaction with the website better, one can observe how a user naturally interacts with the website and see what works well, and what doesn't, therefore pinpointing what needs to be improved/changed.

Week 03 Blog Assignment

Very nice posts so far! But are you reading your peer's posts too? It would be nice if you left some people your comments on what they wrote; hopefully someone will do the same for you too. You don’t have to read everyone’s post — just a couple each week and maybe leave a response to one of them.

By now you should have read Chapter 2 of the book Designing the Obvious. This is an important chapter since it focuses on understanding end user needs, desires, thinking, etc. A variety of methods are discussed to help designers better understand user thinking. For example, the section on mental models helps us understand that people develop certain perspectives about how things work, what’s important, etc., even though the people who designed the product may have a completely different perspective.

Different techniques are discussed in this chapter: use surveys, contextual inquiry, shadowing, persona development, etc.

Given the web site that you identified for Week 02, choose a technique (other than persona development) and describe how you might go about using it to better understand the users of your selected web site. Be sure to mention the web site again, and provide an active link.

Think of yourself as a consultant being asked to help improve the site and you’re recommending a user research technique for study before launching into redesign concepts. Your blog post should be written as a recommendation: using technique X, how it will be used, and why it was chosen. When you describe how the technique will be used, you don’t need to spell it out in great detail, but it should be more than, for example, "I’ll ask some survey questions!"

Andrew DeVoe - Blog Assignment #2

The site I have chosen for blog post #2 is www.google.com. What could be more obvious design than this easy-to-use, EXTREMELY straightforward search engine?

What I believe made this search engine so popular is the fact that it is as straightforward and self-explanatory as a web site/search engine could be. You go to the site, enter your query, and press enter. I don't see how anyone could be confused with this layout. No instructions are required, and almost anyone without any prior internet/computer experience could figure this easy one out in less than a few seconds. This is obvious design at its finest. Hats off to you, google.com. Keepin' it simple.

Obvious design for Apple product support website

The website I've that I consider to be an example of obvious design is the Apple product support website (http://www.apple.com/support/).  I consider this website to be an example of obvious design because it's clear and intuitive for most users to interact with.  When you first visit the website, at center of the website and at eye level for most users is the featured support topics menu.  For most users, reading a website will start from the left side.  Since the user is visiting a support website for product help, to left of the screen is a browse support menu.  Here a user can easily see a list of the most common products, click on the name of the product, and be taken to a dedicated support webpage for the product.  If the users' product is not listed, a pull down menu with all products can easily be seen and the user can select the desired product to seek support for.  

#2 - Obvious Design - Nik Spurgetis

My apologies for being late on this one--serves me right for waiting until Monday night to do this; Murphy's Law smacked me hard.

The site I chose as an example of obvious design is kind of silly, but very functional, and I hope that the humor doesn't strike anybody as too distasteful for a school assignment. I won't post any screencaps just in case.

If you don't mind unnecessary profanity, please direct your browser to www.thefuckingweather.com

Other weather services are useful indeed, and provide far more information than is provided by the above site, but when you just want to know what to put on before heading out (if, for some reason, a window is not available to you), it's perfect. The centered, oversized, all-caps text tells you the two figures of greatest concern: the temperature and any adverse condition such as rain, snow, or fog. Also, the use of mostly black and white on the screen provides a stark indication of what the user is supposed to be looking at, instead of being distracting with bright flashy doodads everywhere on the page. All of the controls (buttons/checkboxes/text fields) are clearly labeled and don't rely on the user to figure out tiny graphic abstractions a la YouTube.

If you want a perfectly obvious way to receive the weather for the day, look no further!

Blog Assignment 2 - liog.org

1. The website that I have chosen is www.liog.org. It is a website that posts streaming Dave Matthews music from his live performances.

2. I believe that it is an obvious design because of the way that it has very simple labeled functions that allow a first time user to navigate and use the features with no familiarity with the website. The left side of the screen contains a info bar that helps to navigate to shows, a simple search option, and a login feature. Simple links like this help to be as Robert Hoekman writes "intuitive, streamlined, uniformed." They are intuitive in the fact they do exactly what they say, streamlined in that they are organized in a simple fashion, and uniformed because of fact they are all similar looking and are single links not compounded. I feel that this website is a very good example of a obvious design.

Blog 2-Imail

Originally for this blog I had chosen the iTunes application and the way in which you choose your desired media.  Immediately on the front page of the iTunes Store it has all the types of media iTunes has to offer like movies, music, audiobooks etc.  Then in the midst of thinking about my option I decided to check my mail.  I typed in imail.iu.edu and guess what popped up?  A screen with a really big button that said "login."  I thought what could be more obvious than that.  Then the next screen shows one text box for "username" and another for "pass phrase."  To me imail has an obvious login process and just takes a little common sense to get through.

Steve Flockenhaus

Blog Assignment Number 2-James Berghoff

For the website I chose that I felt had obvious design was the umail login page and where you are supposed to put in your username and password. This page is very obvious in what it is asking its users to do. Directly in the middle of the page it says 'username' and 'password' which is obviously saying that you need to type in your username and password in order to login to your email account. So, once you get to the login page, you know exactly what to do when looking to get past the login page.
https://cas.iu.edu/cas/login?cassvc=IU&casurl=https://umail.iu.edu/CasLogin.aspx?ReturnUrl=/Login/Default.aspx

blog 2 - tumblr.com

1.) The site that I chose for this assignment is tumblr.com

2.) The part I would like to focus on is the “dashboard” page. The design is nice and simple but still communicates clearly. Anything that a user wants to post to tumblr can be done right from the bar at the top of this page. There are one word options given along with a picture. Very neat and very easy for users to know what each option will give them. I just created a tumblr account recently and was able to quickly able to figure out how to upload to the site without any tutorials or help pages. This site has an obvious design that works quite well in my opinion.

Obvious design in pricewatch.com

I chose pricewatch.com for an obvious design. When you get to the website, under the logo of the site it says "Who has the lowest price." This would allude the user to thinking that the site has an obvious purpose of finding the lowest price for what you're looking for. Another obvious part of the design though is in the middle where it lists different types of technology (this site's first purpose was to find low prices for computer parts) that you would be interested in buying under different categories. It also has low prices for other categories that are on the left side like: Men's Apparel, Womens Apparel, Shoes, watches, jewelery, toys, home decor, etc.

Website: www.pricewatch.com

Blog Assignment # 2

I found a web site which is www.gooogle.com that I considered to be obvious design as stated in our textbook. Most of people probably heard of the Google website, or have experiences in using the web site. The whole part of www.google.com is considered to be obvious design because it is clear that the web site is designed very simple that, as stated in the textbook, "people using them attribute their ability to use the web site effectively to pure common sense." When you visit the Google web site, you will clearly notice that this web site has obvious design since there's only one box and two search buttons. The Google website doesn't force users to understand how the site works, instead any new user would clearly be able to understand how things work for this web site.

Blog Assignment 2 - bikely.com

For blog assignment 2, I chose the search section of bikely.com. Bikely.com is a website where cyclists can go and share routes for locations all over the world. When I first used it, I was particularly impressed by the search features and the ease with which it allowed me to find just the kind of cycling route I was looking for in the Bloomington area.

It allows you to narrow your search, first with the city name, the country, and the state. This is all fairly standard in this kind of search feature. The bit that really caught my attention was the "Tagged With" and "But Not With" box. At first glance, I was slightly intimidated by this. I had no idea what kind of "tag terminology" I might need to employ to get me desired results. However, (and this is the clever part) when you click to type in either of the two boxes, a menu of the standard tags appears, allowing you to select your options. This allows you to find a route tailored exactly to your specifications. For instance, I really enjoy cycling, but am not really training for anything at this point. So I normally shoot for a route that is "Scenic, Smooth, Basic-Intermediate, Low-traffic." The ease with which I can find routes has allowed me, a non-native, find some really interesting and rewarding bike routes in the Bloomington area.

Blog 2

www.jambase.com---a website used to find live music; specifically the search feature

First of all, the search feature on jambase has only the features that are absolutely necessary to complete your search and get the results you are looking for. As you can see you can either complete an advanced, more specific search by filling in all of the fields in the search box. However, a user can also use the show finder to browse shows in a specific city, all shows for a specific artist, particular dates, or by venue. All of these fields I feel represent the user's mental model for how shows should be categorized. By this I mean they cover all of the information that a show might be categorized by so a user has many options to find the show they are looking for. Finally, there is no clutter in the search box; it is simple and to the point.

Tanner Sheridan

Chris Hall - Blog #2

1. So the site I chose for blog assignment #2 is half.com. However the aspect of this sight that I am focusing on is the selection tabs at the top, and the further categories that appear on the left side of the page in relation to which tab you select.

2. The reason I find this part of the site to be an “obvious design” as Robert Hoekman, Jr. calls it, is the way these categories help you to narrow down what you it is you’re looking for. A lot of times we type the name of something we are searching for into a search bar and get a large number of matches. Of these however only a few are related to what we are actually searching for. This site, with its categorical system, tried to eliminate some of those excess matches. The other great aspect of this site is that it does not force the user to do anything if they don’t wish to. They are free to just type in what they are looking for and search as they please. In this way the system works for the user not against them, in that it will do only as much work (narrowing down the search) as the use wants.