Describe how to match the user analysis with your design strategies. Why is it i
ID: 3666623 • Letter: D
Question
Describe how to match the user analysis with your design strategies. Why is it important to consider your users when you plan your design?
What are some of the most important things to keep in mind when accommodating groups of users?
Look at an online manual and using the criteria from “Solutions to Design Problems,” evaluate how effective the manual is. What could be changed about the design in order to better accommodate users?
What are the major differences in screen design and page design? If you were adapting the same information to both, what would you need to do differently in each case?
Explanation / Answer
User analysis tasks and goals so that these findings can help make decisions about development and design.
Proper planning of the Web site helps determine how to maximize reusability of the Web site through appropriate use and reuse of page templates, subtemplates, and region templates.
It is important to understand that the more time spent on the planning process, the easier the Web site and the site assets are to create and manage. You might think that there is more time required to plan a managed Web site using Site Studio, but the result is much less time spent managing the assets.
Proper planning is vital to making the site easier to run. In the beginning stages, it might seem as if more time is being spent before any pages are complete compared to older methods of creating a Web site. But the results of time spent properly planning the Web site makes the construction of it through the site assets much easier, and the maintenance of the Web site, especially when making later changes when the Web site is live.
When you consider the Web site, you should look at all content and all of the structure and consider what is reusable, and what should be used only once. When considering this, it could be thinking of simply the layout of the page, or it could be simply what data is displayed, or it could be a consideration of a certain piece of data displaying in a certain way.
Because there are so many ways of arranging and reusing the different parts of the site, it may be helpful to look at these examples oforganization and reuse to think about while you consider your own Web site.
In a typical Web site, there is the navigation on the left, the banner graphic on top, and a large central area with the information on the page itself. We would expect that the banner and the navigation should be on all pages, so this would be placed on the page template itself. But the information in the middle will obviously be different from page to page. This is where the considerations are most important.
The way the information is organized is the most important consideration. When you look at one page, it may have objects arranged in one column, or in an array, or broken up with images. It's possible to arrange everything in one placeholder, but there is the other aspect, where you can create smaller sections, each with its own smaller contributor data file.
Consider a page on your Web site that would list open employment positions. You could create the page such that it is one placeholder, listing all internal positions and all external positions. Or you could create a subtemplate within that placeholder (which would then contain separate placeholders and region templates, and so forth), so that the external positions would be stored separately from the internal positions. Each could be maintained in a separate contributor data file, so that the external Web site would contain only the external announcements, and the internal Web site would contain both the contributor data file with external announcements and the one with internal announcements.
Another use would be where each department in the company could list their own job openings; then, on one central page, you could collect all of those individual openings and display them all. In these instances, you can use a subtemplate to easily manage the differing numbers of placeholders.
Other considerations for how you lay the data out on the page, and how to organize the placement of the data within the Web site, needs this kind of consideration on a page by page basis.
You should consider these questions: Would it be best to use one placeholder on the page template, then use a subtemplate to break that placeholder up into parts? Or would it be better to have a few more page templates to allow for different placeholder arrangements?
Another example would be an instance where you have a small piece of information that does not necessarily need a separate page, but you would definitely want to reuse. An example of this could be stockholder contact information, or possibly job application information, separate from typical corporate contact information. The information is not enough to necessarily warrant its own page.
In all of these cases, the page template would be the same. It would have the banner, the navigation, a footer, and then in the middle, the placeholder representing the area that can be replaced and filled with any information you need, structured exactly as you need it. It was the consideration of how to use a subtemplate to further use a placeholder or multiple placeholders within that template that enables you to keep the single look that you need for all pages.
It would also be possible to achieve this layout with different page templates on each page. Again, it depends on how you plan your site.
As you can see, the most important part of the site creation is to figure out how each portion of the Web site, both in terms of structure and content, is displayed. With Site Studio, the more time you invest in planning before you create, the less time you spend creating the hundreds and even thousands of pages your Web site delivers.
Planning Your Site Hierarchy
The site hierarchy is the framework of your Web site. You should give yourself plenty of time to plan the hierarchy before you start creating web pages. The site hierarchy not only helps you organize and manage content on your site, but it is also used by Site Studio to automate certain tasks.
How Deep Should the Hierarchy Be?
A deep hierarchy places information at multiple levels where information is heavily categorized. This works well for large organizations or any organization that anticipates growth on the Web site.
When planning the Web site, a lot of care should be taken in considering the hierarchy of the web pages within the site. The Web site hierarchy can be as deep as you want, and as deep as you want. You can create as many different sections from the home page as needed, and a section can contain as many sections as needed as well. However, the thing that should be kept in mind while designing the hierarchy is that while the structure can be as wide as needed (that is, sections can be nested to any depth), that this can create unwieldy URLs. The wider a section is nested in a Web site, then the longer the URL is to retrieve that information. Usually this is a trivial consideration, but for some designers this can be a major point.
Each section listed in the site hierarchy can have a primary page, and a secondary page. Since secondary pages are the pages that have replaceable content, the secondary pages are used to create multiple versions of the pages within a section. The primary page within a section is the page that opens for that section, it could be considered the landing page for that section.
While you use your site hierarchy to manage your site, visitors use your hierarchy to browse to and locate content. In Site Studio, when you add a navigation fragment to a page template, the fragment reads your site hierarchy and generates links that comprise the overall site navigation. You can easily add, remove, and rename sections of your site, and these changes are seen in your site navigation. You should think carefully about the visitor's experience as you construct this hierarchy.
Your site hierarchy has individual sections with names such as Products, Services, and About Us. These names are important. They not only help you organize content on your site, but they display in the navigation on the site, where visitors see it. It is a good idea to revisit these names regularly to ensure that they reflect the content of the sections they represent.
Another thing to consider as you assemble your site hierarchy is the Web site address that contributors and site visitors see in their web browser address bar. By default, Site Studio uses the names (labels) that you give to the sections in your site hierarchy.
You can override these values, if you like, by specifying a different path name and page name for each section. It is best to plan this ahead of time to minimize any late changes to the site address or paths used in the address, which could result in broken links or missing shortcuts for contributors and site visitors.
There are some things that the designer must add to the site, such as the background color, positioning devices (HTML tables or CSS), site navigation, and custom scripts. But much of the content for each web page (that is, the actual information on the page) can be created and edited by a contributor.
To really harness the power of Site Studio, you should open up as much of the Web site as possible to these users. This way, your Web site can be continuously updated without the bottlenecks or delays typically associated with a Web site.
On every page template, you can have one large contribution region or several small contribution regions. Within a region template, you can have one or several elements, each one appearing as a field where users (contributors) add and edit content.
There are different types of elements that can be used for specific purposes, like adding and editing text, graphics, and updating lists. You can turn on or off certain formatting attributes, such as the choice of typeface, font size, images, tables, and custom properties. These choices depend on how much control you want the contributor to have over a given web page. You can also enforce what content is added using the validation feature or your own validation scripts.
There are so many differences between the two media that it is necessary to take different design approaches to utilize the strengths of each medium and minimize its weaknesses.
With better hardware, differences in terms of appearance and layout may diminish. At the same time, more powerful software and a better understanding of interactive information objects will increase the differences in terms of interaction and user control. Current web designs are insufficiently interactive and have extremely poor use of multimedia. It is rare to see a web animation that has any goal besides annoying the user.
Print design is highly refined, as evidenced by glancing through the recent book of award-winning designs. Web design is impoverished because too many sites strive for the wrong standards of excellence that made sense in the print world but do not make sufficient advances in interactivity.
Response Time, Resolution, and Canvas Size
Print is immensely superior to the Web in terms of speed, type and image quality, and the size of the visible space. These differences are not fundamental. We will eventually get:
For the next ten years or so, the differences will remain and will dictate restrictions on web design: less graphics, smaller graphics, shorter text (since it is unpleasant to read online), less fancy typography (since you don't know what fonts the user has installed), and less ambitious layouts.
Even when we get perfect hardware in ten years, it will continue to be necessary to limit the word count since users are more impatient online and are motivated to move on . It will also be necessary to design web information for small-canvas layouts since portable devices will retain small screens even as we get huge screens in the office.
I predict that new, non-window-based screen management techniques will appear that will allow more interesting utilization of the future huge displays. A bigger display doesn't simply imply larger windows, even though some systems currently promote the notion of "maximization" as the ultimate user goal.
Multimedia, Interactivity, and Overlays
Print can stun the reader with high-impact visualization, but the online medium ultimately wins because of theuser engagement that is made possible by non-static design elements. The Web can show moving images under user control and it can allow the user to manipulate interactive widgets. In the future, it will also be possible to use alpha-channel blending and overlay multiple layers of information.
Basic web technology easily allows an interactive map of Chile where the user can click on a city or region to go to a specialized page with more in-depth information. An even greater amount of engagement follows from a more closely integrated interactive visualization where pointing to objects results in explanations or expansions in context, possibly using pop-ups, overlays, or voice-over. Such highly interactive information graphics require the use of non-standard technology and are therefore not currently recommended on mainstream web pages, but they can be used in specialized services and will hopefully become a common part of the Web's future.