To me, a good website design must have wonderful graphic design with cool flashes and nice background music. But, after reading these articles, I know that I’m wrong. What is worth noticing in website design is how the audience can understand the information easily and exactly. Thus, designers don’t need to use too complicated and fancy visual design. If you have a fancy website with rich information, but lacks organization and it’s hard to navigate, it would be a useless website.
As we know, organizing website content in accordance with everyday conventions is the best way to ensure that visitors have a good experience at the website because designers can expect about an interface’s behavior based on users’ previous experiences with other interfaces. Moreover, designers have to clearly know what they want the users to see at first. It’s a very important question to ask themselves and think about before starting their design. Moreover, they should not only figure out how to create a balance between creativity and usefulness, but also understand the concept of hierarchy in order of importance is very crucial.
I obtain some important concepts in website design from these articles:
1. Understand your audience: Both articles mentioned the use of visitors and designers have to know what attracts your audience. Christina pointed out how to assure a usable web site organization by doing a simple card sort, which is a useful exercise to organize your contents into categories for easy browsing. She also reveals how to invite potential users of the web site to participate in the design by card sorting, thus assuring the web site creator of a usable organization system. I really think that card sorting is a nice way to understand users, and even their psychological factor for accessing the website. Moreover, user testing is helpful for designers to understand people’s ways of organizing and how they may perceive the designed website. Not only can the user testing enhance the designed website, but it can also prevent some errors or inconvenience that might happen to the use of the designed website.
2. Visual hierarchy and Simplify: Using visual relationships to tell a coherent story and elements are arranged in an easily understood order of importance. Designers need to measure the degree of the visual weight by audiences’ demand and interest.Also, I believe that sometimes simplicity is the best key because too much unnecessary graphic design and flashes would annoy audiences. If a website has too much "noise", it would confuse audiences. For example, I like to use some white space in my assignment, like a design chart, PPT, and so on, to make it clearly and easily to be read. Last week, we knew Gestalt theory. It is also useful for visual hierarchy.
Just as the article “Cognitive Psychology& IA” said, “In most cases websites just support one categorization approach for content and accommodating everyone is impossible. “ Therefore, one thought is bothering me. I know that a website design would be efficient if it meets users’ expectations. However, how can we control and understand all of our audiences and potential users? Do they have similar opinions? How can the website satisfy their all needs? This is the most difficult question to answer. All users are different because of their age, education, culture, vocation, and even personality. It’s the hardest part of design I think.
