Project One

For my example of bad design, I’ve chosen the Mechanical Engineering “People” website tab. With 49 members of the teaching and research staff, this website layout is not conducive to people who might need to search for a specific professor that they cannot identify by name but remember their face. The massive image and text size, paired with the utilization of a single column for the entire directory, makes searching this page painful. I would recommend smaller images and text, as well as a multi-column approach to make this website friendlier to users.

I turn again to one of Carnegie Mellon’s websites for my example of good design. I consider this effective design because I believe it utilizes the website space well. The photos are relevant, and each caption effectively summarizes each person’s contribution to the “Carnegie Mellon Founders” story and invites you to click through to see more of the person’s contributions. Here we can also see how much better a multi-column approach is when presenting more than a few people’s bios. The final addition of good design I believe this website contains is its grey “scroll to the top” arrow. Its placement doesn’t interfere with the information being presented, and allows for easier navigation through the website since all navigation tabs are found on the top of the website only. If I were to change this website, I would better format the text so that its contained within the same borders as the Founder images (exemplified in Po-Shen Loh’s summary above).