By Alec<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

I asked my three critics the following questions:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

1. In terms of visual appeal, what \u201cworks\u201d? What needs improvement?<\/p>\n

2. In terms of functionality, what \u201cworks\u201d? What needs improvement?<\/p>\n

3. Think of a website that has excellent web design. What makes this site enjoyable to use, and what could I adopt from it?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

First, some context: my website is up and running, but only just. The only pages I have working are one showing off a map I whipped up in CartoDB (link<\/a>) and the visualization I made with TextPlot (link<\/a>). That’s it.<\/p>\n

With that qualifier in mind, it isn’t surprising that the most common critique I got was that the site is pretty barren. For example, I had to provide all background information about the project in person, since I don’t have a \u201cProject Description\u201d page up yet. All three of my peers made some variation on the comment that if I hadn’t been there to explain the graph and map to them, they would have had a hard time understanding them.<\/p>\n

The TextPlot graph proved to be the more confusing of the two pages for my peers, which I expected. One friend recommended that I overlay some sort of info box atop the graph, while another suggested that I make a tutorial. I’m wondering if the best solution might be to use Neatline, since we’ve already seen that it works well even for non-geographical texts. In any case, I definitely want to come up with a way to explain the graph in a way that isn’t too text-heavy, since personally I get turned off by sites that throw huge walls of text at me.<\/p>\n

As for positive feedback, all three of my peers said that my map is \u201creally cool.\u201d That isn’t terribly helpful on its own, but when pressed, they gave more concrete feedback: one liked the way the black and red colors matched up with the rest of the site, while another said that the experience of zooming in and around the map is very natural. One pointed out some typos and visual glitches that I probably wouldn’t have caught on my own, like how the map’s title can obscure the description. Overall, though, the map seemed to be a real crowd-pleaser. Really cool.<\/p>\n

Somewhat disappointingly, I only got a \u2018real’ answer for the last question out of one of my peers. The other two had a hard time thinking of a website whose design they enjoy, and ended up just settling on sites they use frequently, like Facebook or Tumblr. One friend, however, offered the Bonnaro site (link<\/a>) as an example. She said that the simple structure with all relevant information at the top of the page makes it easy to use, but also that the site is just pleasing to the eye in general, what with all the vibrant colors and images. She then compared this visual style to the red and black color scheme I currently have going on my site, and encouraged me to maintain that I as I add more features. This balance between form and function is definitely something I personally value in sites, and hope to achieve in the final product of my project.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Alec I asked my three critics the following questions: 1. In terms of visual appeal, what \u201cworks\u201d? What needs improvement? 2. In terms of functionality, what \u201cworks\u201d? What needs improvement? 3. Think of a website that has excellent web design. What makes this site enjoyable to use, and what could I adopt from it? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}