Principles and Standards of Web Design

As users of the internet we want a lot sometimes. We want the website to be user friendly, really cool looking, and for it to fit your needs.

Is the above necessary? Well yes. In this case a web designer would need to figure out how to satisfy what their company goals as well as the consumers. I learned this in an article I read this week and it really makes web designing so much more difficult. There are many people with a variety of mindsets that a designer needs to try and satisfy. A really cool website will not cut it if people can’t read the words on it. Hence a website can’t just be super cool.

Do not worry though. Before learning about user experience, I never thought about it much either. The only thing I did think about when I thought of when designing a website was how to make it so people can use it easily and make it cool looking. However, I thought of it in the mindset of people who see perfectly, hear perfectly. I did not think about people with disabilities or anything else. Disabilities can be both physical and mental. As a psychology minor I know that there are many different types of disabilities and mostly everyone at least experiences it in their lifetime. I feel guilty that I never thought of that. I learned that it is very important to let people be able to go on a website equally.

Here is a brief intro on what User Experience is in my point of view. User Experience is the experience of the user using a website or application. How they feel using it, how simple or hard it is etc. User Experience also includes many other things like accessibility. The reason I say that is because accessibility is an important part of the user experience. For example, if someone is blind and there is nothing on the website to help with that then they can’t use the site. The lack of accessibility should not happen.

Articles I read:

I read a lot of articles this week for my web design class so I am going to talk about the 3 that helped me the most and what I learned from it. In the article “10 Heuristics for User Interface Design”, the author Jakob Nilsen wrote about the 10 heuristics. I think while reading the article I was like what? I’m so confused. However, after doing the assignment based on this article it all clicked together. The thing that stood out to me the most was first heuristic ,visibility of system status. This is where the website lets the user know where they are standing. For example, if a user is uploading, sending, or buying something the website should always give a notification saying it is complete or a time bar to show how long it will take. I think this is so important. I haven’t yet experienced a website that does not do this but there might be some out there. The other thing I read was actually a slideshow. This article made me open up my eyes and see so much more in depth on web design. It was on web accessibility. Big things I remember from the slides are alt in an image tag, do not count on color to represent something, and CAPTCHAs. I thought that this slideshow was nice because even though there are many other things to think about they show a lot of easy ways someone can do to make their website more accessible to everyone. The alt lets the designer write about the image in case a person is blind or for some reason can not see. When they say do not count on color, they say this because some people may be color blind. As an artist myself, I always thought that color is very important and it can symbolize things. However, there is an exception to web design and I see how important it is. Then there is the CAPTCHAS, which are annoying for everyone. Websites use this feature to make sure we are humans and not computers. I mentioned in Slack that sometimes people just can’t read whatever it is they want us to type in. However, that does not make us robots. A classmate of mine mentioned that they now use a simpler one where you only have to check off in a box to say you are human. From the slideshow it gave me many tips for assignment 15 and I have been trying to apply them in my website. The next article I want to talk about is the Google maps one. I found this article to be relative to me because I am really not good with directions at all. I depend on Google maps to help me get to where I want to go. Google maps is a good at connecting with users. This means a good UX Design. Google Earth is so crazy. You can see everything around you look exactly the same. This makes it easier to find your way especially if you are walking. If google didn’t evolve this way then it would be hard on users who can’t read maps or focus just on the directions. Also, it gives many different types of maps which allows people to choose which one works best for them. If I am driving I would rather use the normal google maps but if I’m walking I would rather use google earth.

Experiences:

I think the way I view things is so much different now. Just the other day when I played a game on my iPhone I was analyzing the application. I was thinking about their design and if their UX is good. I was looking at the game Draw Something. While I was drawing something I thought to myself if it was accessible or not. I do not think it is. They only have different languages to select from. This was probably not the best thing to analyze though because there may be stuff that I can’t find. I should’ve looked at a random website and did an analysis on it. So I can see the semantic layout of it and everything.

Assignment 15:

While doing assignment 15, I really like it. I think it lays out everything I learned in this class. In my first iteration, I put in the semantic elements and wrote in what I was going to put for each section. The menu will be in the <nav> part. The <header> contains the logo. etc. In the second iteration, I put all the required content and used a href to separate links from texts. The second iteration has no styling to it. For id and class we learned that it is better to put them in for everything so that when you need to use it for styling you are ready. However, I chose to use it when on a needed basis. In the third iteration I started to use CSS and tried to use what we learned like border, margin, background-color etc to make it as nice a possible. I am thinking of doing another iteration just to do UX stuff to make sure that I have that in there. I will add in alt to all the images I put in and I am still thinking of what else to do. Still not finished with this assignment but here is how it is for now.

Difficulties in Web Design:

It may seem easy to create a website at first. After this class I realized it’s actually hard. Let’s take Google for example. The designers at Google have to create a a website for billions of people. They should always keep UX and design in their mind. Yes it can be easy to do html and css and including accessibility designs. The hard part is being able to satisfy both the company and the users. How will that be possible? I think the answer as simple as it sounds is compromise.There are laws on accessibility of websites now. So I think that is where the compromise should be. To satisfy at least what the law states. The rest is up to what the company goals are and who they are targeting. The companies can also ask for input from their users on what they want as well. In my opinion after everything I learned and read I think that would allow a website to be great. Of course, satisfying everyone 100% is never going to happen. On the bright side it can as good as 99% which is already great.

How I feel about this class:

Firstly, I would like to say that I loved this class. Even though I have such a busy summer that it becomes overwhelming sometimes. It was like one of the classes I’ve taken that I actually felt like I learned something from. I think in the beginning I was like okay I got this, this is not too bad and then it got harder but I was like it’s all good I just have to design stuff nicely and make sure I understand the material. I just have to check things a lot and make sure there are no mistakes and follow the directions. Then, I got to the user experience part of the course. I was MIND BLOWN. Even though it was hard before with more coding and harder assignments this was a whole different level. When we had the class discussions I felt like there’s so much thinking put into this section. You constantly have to think about your design and communicate with people or else no matter how pretty your design is. I also feel like I learned a new super important skill. I can write html tags off the top of my head. CSS still takes some getting used to I think. The float property is very helpful and I love using position:relative. I think I learned a lot and I’m happy to have gained skills in this area. Hopefully this will help me find a good job once I graduate.

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