Monthly Archives: March 2008
Teaching my lovely Word level 2 students
What they think of Word 2007 They like and love Word. The interface is quite intuitive. There is more functionality. They love how you can customize everything, such as, save templates, building blocks (like headers and footers), and styles. “The blog thing seems pretty cool.” Amber My students These students are so enjoyable, and they [...]
Hiccups when teaching Final Cut Pro today
Today was a bit of a different day. I woke up, got ready to go to work, and then began teaching my Final Cut Pro class — Day two. I was already about a chapter behind. Around 10:40, the power went out. This happened to have been during our classes morning break and I was [...]
Quality and Value in Design
Quality
Quality in design of your web site requires:
- Sensible navigation
- Feedback mechanisms
- Reliability
- A designer who cares about the project and its end users
How do we decide on the final quality in our designs?Ray and I came up with some ideas from several web sites. If you use tried and true definitions of hypermedia quality, you are almost guaranteed to create a quality site.
Text
Based on a meta analysis of research related to cognitive and psychological influences of typography, a digest of ‘best practices’ as they relate to the display of textual information on computer screens follows. (Rehe, 1984)
- Very long and short lines of text make reading more difficult
- Optimal text sizes for general text is between 12pt and 14pt.
- For optimal text sizes, 10 to 12 words per line is ideal.
- For optimal text sizes a line height of 125% improves legibility.
- Type faces of medium weight are recommended.
- Light text on dark background reduces reading speed by as much as 14%.
- White space around or within the text block increases readability.
- The hierarchy of information is perfectly clear
Navigation
- Navigation buttons and bars are easy to understand and use
- Navigation buttons and bars are easy to understand and use
- Navigation is consistent throughout web site
- Navigation buttons and bars provide the visitor with a clue as to where they are, what page of the site they are currently on
- Frames, if used, are not obtrusive
- A large site has an index or site map
Links
- Link colors coordinate with page colors
- Links are underlined so they are instantly clear to the visitor
- Make obvious what’s clickable: for text links, use colored, underlined text (and don’t underline non-link text).
- Differentiate visited and unvisited links.
- Explain what users will find at the other end of the link, and include some of the key information-carrying terms in the anchor text itself to enhance scannability and search engine optimization (SEO). Don’t use “click here” or other non-descriptive link text.
Graphics
- Buttons are not big and dorky
- Every graphic has an alt label
- Every graphic link has a matching text link
- Graphics and backgrounds use browser-safe colors
- Animated graphics turn off by themselves
General Design
- Pages download quickly
- Pages fit into a pixel space common to your users� monitors
- Good use of graphic elements (photos, subheads, quotes) to break up large areas of text
- Every web page in the site looks like it belongs to the same site; there are repetitive elements that carry throughout the pages
Content
20 Things To Remember For Good Web Copy
- Tight writing. That doesn’t mean bad or easy writing
- Copy of about 600-800 words is better for SEO and catching the long tail of search.
- Title � Subject �Support, in that order, like subject, verb, object.
- Titles should be snappy and informative and clickable, but clear.
- Leads (first sentence or paragraph) should get to the point. Tell the reader what the article’s about first thing.
- No fancy, wordy intros where it’s not clear what you’re talking about.
- Information beats fluff every time. Pretty is for books and newspapers (and only sometimes).
- Information does not beat style every time. Style keeps people awake.
- Sans serif fonts are easier and faster to read on computer screens.
- White space is awesome � even better than big, pretty pictures.
- Content should be scannable.
- Think in bullets and subtitles.
- People like lists.
- Pictures should be specific and informative, not generic, decorative and ad-like.
- Photos should be relevant to content.
- People in pictures should look friendly and approachable (and have their whole head).
- Photos should be full body if possible (so guys can check out packages and stuff).
- Spell stuff right. It makes you look smarter.
- Grammar IS important.
- The text of press releases and other public news should be very tight.
Value
What gives value to hypermedia? Something is important because it matters to someone, because it either does or does not deliver things of value so can any hypermedia ever deliver value?
Injecting Value into Hypermedia
- Know your user
- Don’t get too personally involved in “your” project, become objective
- End users should evaluate your design
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/03/14/news-article-design-20-tips-for-good-web-copy
Home Schooling… Yes, I have an opinion
Are our home schooled children confused and lacking knowledge? Time magazine is reporting this week that California is looking to outright ban homeschooling unless the parent can prove having a teacher certification. I think that would involve a certification for both elementary and secondary school teaching. That would then involve getting a certificate and/or endorsement [...]
Studying more efficiently
A New Desk A couple of weeks ago, I got so frustrated when working on my stats homework. I was trying to hand crunch factorial design, but I had no room for all the class notes, the textbook, my calculator, all kinds of pages for the assignment spread out, and my computer with SPSS installed. [...]
My SITE Presentation
Topic Topic: Using Concept Maps to Enhance Students’ Prior Knowledge in Complex Learning Abstract: Relevant prior knowledge is an important component to learning new, complex topics. However, adults are often faced with learning new topics wherein they have low prior knowledge. Novice learners can experience difficulty learning new topics and learning can create high cognitive [...]
Experiential Cognition and Direct Manipulation
Direct Manipulation Limitations Direct manipulation regarding technology has several limitations. Physical constraints include inability to see text or movement on the monitor, inability to use an input device such as a mouse, and inability to hear error messages, etc. Semantic constraints include inability to understand the text and links on a web site. Be careful [...]
Sarah’s Wet Cats
Here are the pictures of web cats from the Rippin’ Kittens blog. My student Sarah tried to show these during class last Wednesday, but the blog with the pictures would not load. Here you go guys!
JavaScript Breadcrumbs
Navigation breadcrumbs are an important part of making your web site Human-Computer Interaction friendly. I have created a page in my Technology Goodies section of my web site that gives you the code I have been using for years. Feel free to use this breadcrumbs script on your web site. It has sure helped my [...]
