world house

this is a really cool blog, interesting stuff, design orientated, but not necessarily graphic design. http://www.worldhouse.ca/
it is a little hard to navigate and at least for me was slow to load, but its still worth looking at.
also, http://www.canuhome.com is a new housing project that is REALLY INTERESTING, it is a green, economical savvy housing project and looks great too.

and another thing..

our customer orders system is set up so you can only print new orders since the last print out once, other wise you have to reprint for the whole day or dates. this means if you mess up, the 1995 9 post printer jams, or you hit the wrong number somewhare-you have to print out a million orders then go back thorugh the ones we already had and find the copies. this is importent because the backers can not waist there time making the same cake twice and we deffintly dont want to not print an order because it will never get made. woulets is too cheap to buy a new printer that jams all the time, or to update thier system that seems to have been programed when that printer was new.

selfish customers

usability issue with work-there is no way to say we are closed until we actually lock the door, and we cant lock the door if someone is in the store, so today, a women could not make up her mind on ordering a cake and she came in around 5:55 and we closes at 6. so she kept asking questions to one employee while the rest of us did closing duties thinking she would leave a couple minutes after 6. well at about 6:15 she is still in there and not interested in leaving and people are starting to come into the store thinking we are still open even though there is nothing left on the shelves-and then complain that there is nothing left. we need an "open close" sign!

a long time

so it has been a while since i have posted a blog, but i need to start to keep this up, so hear it goes.
our re-re-redesign went well, we fixed the hierarchy problems and made some more changes to how the user buys the product. the design mostly stayed the same though. we are pretty much done with our site though. i think it is a major improvement to the original.

oh, and the car wash at the SA in woodberry by Sams Club, the "enter" and the "stop" signs for the person to come into the car wash are hidden behind one of the spinning cleaning things so u don't know, u have to just guess.

Re-Redesign of gov website

Ok, so the first redesign was user tested and the feed back was mostly good, it was easy to use and easy to understand. the few things i did change were to the main nav and the title of the page. the main nav i made darker so it stood out more. it got a little lost, at least in black and white printed. i also made the 'embassy of the united states' at the top more prominent so the 'Dominican republic' made a bit more sense with the USA gov logo next to it. the pics are of the second redesign.

My Redesign of gov web site

the above are my re-dos. >So the things I hated about the site www.usemb.gov.dr/ are that it is un-inviting, hard to navigate and understand, and a lot of real-estate was being used by information not relevant to the porpoise of the site. I chose to take out a fair amount of information off the main page and use that space for news that had barring on visa cases the site and embassy would be processing. I made the sight more inviting, toned down the irritating yellow, made the text a lighter gray that was easy to read and easier on the eyes. i made the language choice bigger and easier to find, and in both languages. I also changed all titles and Link names to more commonly used terms and/or to words that the public uses rather than the embassy. I feel good about my re-design. I have spent a lot of time with this site and the embassy and have found that they really just don't care or in fact like to make things hard and confusing. every time i call them with a question they either don't know what i am talking about or they don't understand the words i say. If i could re-do their entire sight in exchange for my fiancé's visa, i totally would! and i would save some pain for future visa seekers!

usibility test of gov web site

Usability test of www.usemb.gov.do/

Diana:
What is this sight?
A: Bands? Music? Presidents or rulers? Oohh, embassy of US in DR.

Find what you will need to apply for a k-3 visa.
A: what is a k-3 visa…Its in Spanish, she looked around, looked through all drop down menus till she saw the word visa, clicked, looked through all secondary nav: saw k-3, and clicked. Then found out it could be put in English!
Response: I don’t have any governmental knowledge, how do I find anything on this sight? I don’t care about anything on the front page-why does that info need to be there? It needs some kind of obvious direction and nav. “iyik!” and I don’t understand the bottom navigation at all.


Sara:
What is this sight?
A: tries to read some Spanish, ‘Dominican embassy sight, wait, US embassy in the DR”

Find what you will need to apply for a k-3 visa.
A: went through all drop down menus, did not find English version, complained about ‘government wording’, went through secondary nav to find k-3, very excited when she found it.
Response: hard to read when drop down menu falls, embassy highlights not relevant.


Dariel:
What is this sight?
A: I think this sight is pretty biased. .explaining all the good things and great ideas of the American government. Does not really what really is going on. Its designed to give people the impression that all is good...that no war is being waged and that things in the DR are great when it comes to the American mindset of things.

Find what you will need to apply for a k-3 visa
A: I tried finding out the instructions of what I need for a k3 visa and quite frankly the navigations is very simple...there’s nothing uber complex all is simply not titled like it should be. I wonder if its because its an embassy site for a third world country so they have to keep things really simple. but in a matter of 3 or 4 clicks I was the page I needed.

ReWrite of online artical

I chose an article from Dominican Today which is an online english dominican newspaper. the article i chose concerned the racial and marginalization of dominicans by dominicans, and how their political system and culture support this oppression. I wanted to keep a lot of the text because the article was an opinion piece and was written with the intent of evoking emotion and the writer clearly chose the words he felt were appropriate. I chose to make the article easer to read and comprehend on the internet. when i read things on the internet i appreciate it when paragraphs are broken up into 4 or 5 lined clumps, it is easer to keep my place in the text and gives me enough negative space to breath. I also appreciate highlighted phrases or words that connote importance yet the color is not so distracting that I find it hard to read the section. On the same note, I kept my link colors close to the text color so that they would be recognizable as links but not distracting. I also changed the typeface of the article to a more legible serif face instead of the large, clumpy sans serif. I am not, however, insulting Dominican Today's style or legibility of their sight, I find it very easy to read and interesting and it has a 'clean' 'openness' to it that allows me to concentrate on what i am reading rather than adds or other flashy things on the page.

reaction: How users read on the web

After viewing Jakob Nielsen's "How Users Read on hte Web, I feel that the greatist flaw in usibility/design/web writing is that the sites that posses this information very offten do not take the time to follow thire own advice or make thire site something decent to look at. I found this site hard to read, I got lost in the scentence I was reading because it was too long and the words too big, the 'highlighted' phrases and words I found distracting and hindered my ability to follow the pharagraph. the table that was set up was poorly designed-words did not have enugh space to breath and were too close to the box boarders. as far as content, it was kinda basic, maybe to me just because I've heard it before in another class. It is a good reminder when designing a web site with lots of information or content to keep these things in mind, I know when im looking at a sight I really never read pharagraphs unless I know for sure im going to read what I am looking for. and I always appriceiat buileted or numbered lists when dealing with more than 3 eliments consecutivly.

The pod cast with Richard Curtis I found interesting. I like how the 'nations newspaper' was really made for the nation, they did reserch about what the population really wanted in a newspaper and did it. It started in 1982 and really hasn't changed too much since then accourting to Curtis. I found it interesting that he basied his designe ideas off of the content wich is really design 101, but sometimes is hard to find. I was also impressed with the idea of a full page for adds and leaveing the other pages for the content of hte newspaper wich changed their column count to 7 always insted of it changeing from page to page.

1.22.08

today is the first day of class. 

usability. 

the Xplane site is interesting, they have worked with a lot more people than i would have thought. its a pioneering idea that is kinda 'duh'. of course companies need visuals for their ideas and concepts and products and so forth, i wonder how many other companies have followed suit since then. 

As far as the blog making, pretty strait forward. I was surprised with the limitations of 'look' I could choose from, I would think that would be a big part of the blogging scene, since it appears to me that people blog to represent themselves as individuals with opinions in a great wide world of people and opinions. I did like how easy it was to create and there wasn't major limitations on what your name had to be or pass word. it bothers me when sites want so many characters and then later tell you that some of those characters need to be numbers, then later tell you-you cant have caps or something like that. it gets complicated and hard to remember a password when you haven't really chosen it.