Project 1

Effective example: The Bloomberg Markets website can be an effective example for communication design. Bloomberg Markets is a website that provides information about the global markets, including stocks, commodities, bonds, etc. It contains the news, reports, data and other information related to the markets. It is especially useful for people who work in the financial industry. With just a click they can see all the updates in the market. I really like the design of the website because it did a great job showing a great amount of information clearly. It has a white background and black font with appropriate font size. The popular news are listed in the homepage with a small picture and highlighted headlines. Some details are included under the headlines but not too much. On the top of the page there is a bar contains different categories of assets, so the user interested in certain section can get to the news they want much quicker. It also lists several important indicators on the top with a small line graph aside. This design allows the users to learn the real number and the recent trend of the indicator at one glance. The color and layout of the website is very user friendly and the amount of information listed on homepage is enough but not overwhelmed.

Ineffective example: The MarketWatch website is an ineffective example. Like Bloomberg it is also a website that provides information about markets to people interested in finance. However personally I don’t think it is as helpful as Bloomberg. Opening the page you can see big chunk of words, some numbers and some graphs, but it would take you a while to figure out what all this information is about. In the center of the page it has the markets news. The headlines are bold font but the font size is the same as all the other words on the page. It also includes an entire paragraph of the article below the headline. I consider that as an ineffective design. The font of the paragraph is too small for readers to read comfortably and putting a whole paragraph in the center of the page only makes the layout looks messy and waste the space. There is no clear filter for different class of assets. Moreover, on the top of the page it uses dark green as the background color. The words are in yellow, light green and turquoise which are very close to the background and thus not obvious. The design of the webpage is messy and it would take the reader quit a long time navigate to the information they want.