Reading Response: Don't Make Me Think

In chapter 3 Billboard Design 101 described that in order to have a successful site that people can understand are:

1. Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page: appearance or the things on the page, are easy to grasp in a hurry. Show clear relationships between the things on the page, they should have visual hierarchy. The most important or prominent to read like headings one can create hierarchy by creating something bold, larger, distinctive color. To show relationships, you can show that things are similar through groupings and displaying in a similar style. Items can be nested, when something is a section of something greater it can "nested" or encompass. Looking at newspapers like we have done in class and analyzing bolder headlines draw attention. Good visual hierarchy it saves time and the goal is to grave the content instantly. Bad hierarchy throws off.

2. Take advantage of conventions: are very useful they become conventions if they work. Conventions allows for users o go to different sites and without figuring too much out of it. There is familiarity, is easier to travel through sites. Designers sometimes fall in the trap of changing those innovations because they feel that they are doing "same old". If one decides to reinvent it has too make sure that is clear and self-explanatory.

3. Break pages up into clearly defined areas :it allows users to decide quickly on which areas of the page to focus and which ones they will like to ignore.

4. Make it obvious what's clickable: in web people are looking for the next thing click, so is important that is clear. Clicking should be something mindless.

5. Minimize noise: there are two kinds of noise: busy-ness: when everything on the page is clamoring for my attention the effect can be overwhelming. Lots of punctuation marks, many colors, too many things are bold. Background noise: visual noise such as lines, anything that will wears us down.

In chapter 4 Animal, vegetable, or mineral? in order to be successful to get to a certain point it should not take more than 3-5 clicks. Each click is painless and that the user has confidence in navigating and they feel they are on the right track. On the web many choices are not clear, and the problem is that we face choices all the time on the web and making the choices mindless is one of the main things that make a site easy to use.