New Site Design
DITC Swiki (home)
Website Review Outline
Comments
Please comment on the new site design versions below.
New Site Design v01 (Brian)
New Site Design v02 (Ginger)
New Transcript Page Tutorial (HCD)
Recommendations
Please list any general recommendations for the new site here. Included images of any examples or cite web site urls if necessary.
08.30.2002::benjamin
(recommendations)
What page am I on?
There needs to be some way of informing the user what page they are currently on. Keep in mind that that tab title is a seperate page from the tab's sublinks. I've shown two examples below:
Wachovia
Wachovia uses a small red arrow next to the sublink the user is currently visiting. In this case, these are not real sublinks. They are present on every page so that there is no tab associated with them. I put this up to show an example of the arrow idea.
Amazon
Amazon highlights the text on the tab (1) and the text of the current sublink associated with that tab (2). If the user is on the page of the tab itself, then JUST the tab text (1) would be highlighted.
Also notice the different tab styles above. In my opionion, the Wachovia overlapping tabs is more asthetically pleasing. I would not use the faded shadow, keep it simple, but a slight overlap looks nicer. The Amazon tabs seems to crowded when jutted up against each other like that.
09.04.2002::benjamin
(recommendations - cont.)
Login/Sign-up Link
(1) | | (2) |
The top-most darker blue area would be the best place for this. We can list "Login/Sign-up" (1) as the first link in the upper-left corner. It can change to "Edit Profile" (2) or something of the like after the user has logged in.
(3)
There will need to be more contrast in the links when moused-over or active. The current scheme (3) is too similar. "Nuffield" is the selected link in this case and it's contrast to "Learning By Design" is not much. Will be difficult to determine on lower resolution monitors and older folks with not-so-good eyesight. I understand the use of subdued colours so as not to intrude on the main content of the site, but the user still has to be able to know quickly what page they are on and what options are available to them.
"Help" Link Not Needed
There's no need for a "Help" link. The "Getting Started" link should encase any help-type information needed. Plus there really is no way to generalize an "Help" page for the whole site (having a secondary link ever-present like the current Help link would suggest the information contained in this link is relevant to every page on the site).
Less Tabs/More Secondary Links
"Getting Started" can be moved to the list of secondary links in the upper-right corner of the logo bar (the light blue area). I would also add an "About DITC" link there that links to a one page description about the project.
That leaves 6 main links. I'm not sure what "Resources" is supposed to contain, but that MAY be able to be abstracted out if it applies more to a general feature of ALL projects instead of specific information to EACH project.
Colour Scheme
The use of blues and greys (which seem to be a dominate schema in the new site designs thus far) always signify a professional, clean site (think of a sterile hospital or something of the like). Yellow/orange is the natural compliment to blue and should be used as accent colour (i.e. link mouse-overs/active links, slight trim, etc).
Science Ed vs. Tech Ed
There will need to be some sort of "home page" for the site, regardless of our approach. It will contain introductory information about the project and information contained within the site (much like an "About DITC" page). That is where the choice for Science Ed or Tech Ed should be made. Those links are designed to tailor the content of the entire site depending on the user's background/interest. A return to the home page would allow them to change that choice if so desired, or we could incorporate a link into the secondary links section. However, the secondary links section may become too crowded with the addition of more and more links. We need to test if users would want to be able to switch from Science Ed to Tech Ed in one session or are they here to follow only the category that they fall into.
09.10.2002::benjamin
(recommendations - cont.)
New Tabs
- There is not particular order to any of the ideas below. Just wrote them when I thought about them.
- MAIN LINKS
- 1. About DITC - This would encompass "what is DITC", "who we are", etc. I would stay away from "Who We Are". It sometimes gives off the impression that it's telling you more about the people than the project.
- 2. Task Overview - This is needed to introduce the user to each task.
- 3. Final Products & Assessment - This is very important. However, the name could be condensed more. We should talk about what this link is and see if we can get a smaller name. The smaller the name, the cleaner the tabs will look. But we don't want to sacrafice clarity for brevity. If we have to keep a longer name, we have to keep a longer name, just make sure the design encompasses it neatly.
- 4. Teacher Resources - I'm assuming these are the pdf handout documents we have scanned in. A list of relevant links that the teacher may have used to design the curiculum would be good here too.
- 5. Student Design - Obviously users are going to want to see how the students went about interpretting the instructions.
- Key Concepts - I feel this could be incorporated into the "Task Overview" link. It'll outline the task and describe what the key concepts are that this task is trying to relate. These seem to go hand-in-hand.
- 6. Video Timeline - This was left out of the first New Site Design v01 but Ginger caught that and included it in her New Site Design v02. The side-by-side video comparision link would fit better on this page (the timeline itself).
- 7. Teaching Strategies - I think this is what was meant by the "Professional Development & You" link (see comment below). This would outline the preparation and "attack" of the circulum. Perhaps it could be combined with Teacher Resources (or at least a direct link to it within the Strategies content).
- Professional Development & You - The title suggests this is outside the scope of an individual task and more as a general theme to the site. If this is an incorrect assumption, then the title name should be revised to describe better what it links to and how it relates to an individual project.
- What is Design? - Again, it seems like a more general theme. I'm not sure what this page would contain.
- These links above will require text equivalents below (because these will be images). The secondary links below will not need redundant text links below because they are text to begin with.
- I think you and I sitting down and going through the content of these links would be a good idea. If my eye is still red, I will not come in tomorrow (being 11 September, it's a pretty hard day on me anyways for personal reasons). But perhaps Thursday we could set aside an hour to talk my ideas here over aloung with the ones you provided as a starting guide. Just send me an email to let me know so I can prepare a bit.
- SECONDARY LINKS
- Home - The DITC logo should link to the home page. That way we don't use up valuable page retail with the word "Home".
- 1. Login/Sign-up (Edit Profile) - This is outside the realm of each individual project and should be seen/available at all times.
- 2. Contact Us - Same explination as above.
- (3.) ??????Video List?????? - This depends on if this link will contain EVERY video for all projects or just all videos for a particular project. The goal of secondary links is to have content that is always pertenant and not relevant to any one particular design task.
- 4. Chat Room - This is still on hold in terms of development and thus should not be placed on the new site until it is compelted, but when it is ready to go on the new site, it should be a secondary link.
- 5. Search - Self explainitory.
- 6. Site Map - Again, self explainitory.
- Help - This would replace "How To Use This Disk" for 2 reasons: (1) It takes up less space and can be put away in the upper right corner. (2) This site is not a "disk" (at least not on the server). Stop calling it a disk, the user will get confused. Also,it will allow us to keep a similar inteface amoung the HTML, CD-ROM, DVD versions.
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