Week 7 Reading

Chapter 12 is about when the client wants to to make bad design decisions. Things such as animation, splash pages asking for too much info ect.

It is important that people do nto want to fil out forms. When they do they just want to fill out the least amount of infomation they can. If you ask for too much info people will lie to you and will send you incomplete forms. keep it simple and short and you will get more responces. On an upside it will make the client look better because they are nto asking the user to fil out too much infomation.

Also pizzazz is almost never a good thing. web sites do not need the pizzazz, sizzle or flash to them. Users normally just want to get the infomation they need and get out. Adding all the extra stuff just takes them longer to do that and angers them. Of course there are exceptions to the rules such as webpages that are suppose to be fun such as entertainment, branding and protfolio websites.

Of course it is possible to still work these ideas into a webpage and have them be usable. Remember that clients have a reason they are asking for the bad ideas and its our job as designers to figure out why they are asking them and come up with a better solution.

Week 6 Reading

Chapter 10 was all about goodwill towards the user. Basically I learned that you need to make things easy for the user to find and make sure you include infomation that the user could be looking for. If I have a question about something make sure that I can find it. It is also a good idea to make sure that while I am using the website that if i need infomation do not ask me for infomation that You don't really need. People do not like having to fill out forms that ask for infomation that is not needed for the task at hand.

Chapter 11 was about accessablitiy for websites. As a programer it is important to remember that a website needs to be accessable to people with disabilities. Not designeing to planing for htem and believing that the users who have disabilities are not going to use your website is a No-No. If the website is confusing to people who do not have disabilities it is goign to be confusing to peopel who so have disabilities to make not confusing. Use CCS and html as opposed to things such as flash or tables for webpage layout. Tings to also remember use alt image tags, properly label forms using HTML, have skip to main content links a the top of everypage, make all the content accessable using the keyboard and not the mouse, avoid things like javascript and do not use server side image maps.

http://www.w3.org/wai/
http://wave.webaim.org
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/wiwa/

Week 8 Reading

The reading was wealth of infomation. Something that I think I will find very useful in Creating Our App. From Creating custom icons because it is important to have the artwork be different to understanding how Iphones work and know what the commands are so we can plan properly for them. Also how its the little things that are important. As the saying goes: The Devil is in the Details.

http://matadornetwork.com/goods/hot-todesign-smartphone-apps/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/21/iphone-apps-design-mistakes-overblown-visuals/

Http://mashable.com/2010/07/07/designing-mobile-apps/