November 24th, 2009

Readability

I think that the official Bob Dylan site has a high degree of readability. When you enter the site, the first screen you see is very simple. It has a background that doesn't distract you from the content and a picture of Bob Dylan - just in case you forgot what you were looking at. Across the top of the screen, there are links to the other pages of the site including: home, news, tour, albums, songs, media, fine art, community, features, and store.





When you navigate to other pages, the same plain background and picture of Bob Dylan are used, which I think helps the reader get used to what they will see on the pages. When other pictures are added, like the two cameras, they are very simple pictures. Another feature I liked was that the page you are currently on is highlighted in blue. That helps in the navigation of the site.






The only page I found that was a little harder to read was the link for the albums. When you click on it all you see are small icons that are pictures of the album covers. This was a barrage of information compared to what was on the rest of the site. It was helpful, though, that I could put my cursor over the picture and it would tell me the name of the album. All in all, I thought this was a good site.



On the flip side was the Walker Art Center's website. When you get to the home page, you see things that are both helpful and a hindrance. On the top of the page is that helpful bar with the links again, just like on the Dylan page. But, the rest of the page is not so simple. You are flooded with images from the collections that they currently have on display. These images change when you are on the same page for awhile. That was a bit distracting for me. Then, you scroll down and come across 14 boxes that all typically have a different color assigned to them as well as a picture to go along with the words. The boxes themselves are pretty simple...a heading, a picture, and an explanation...but the sheer number of boxes was overwhelming. Also, I noticed that when I clicked on the linked to these boxes, all but to of the links sent me to a page found within the calendar section of the website, which is one of the handy links on the top bar of the page. I am not sure why they had to have the info in more than one place. You could say to emphasize whatever was in those boxes - for example the British Television Commercial Awards - but why do they need to highlight 14 different things at one time?


Activities

As far as activities for the students to participate in and help them gain an understanding of design features and interactivity, I think practice makes perfect. You could teach them the design features that websites do/should use to enhance readability and have them first search the web for things they are interested in and check out the readability (much as we did) and then have them employ those understandings in designing their own websites. They could design a website for a research project or for a pre-reading assignment. Same thing with designing PowerPoints...you could assign a topic to a student. Have them design the PowerPoint. Then you could give them the interactivity lesson and have them redesign their PowerPoint. They could then compare their presentations. Also, they could show their presentations to the class and give feedback as to which one works better.

Here is my presentation.