week 3 - interaction design for the web.
published by Thoriso Samson on
My user alignment I believe would be anyone in tech or gamers who appreciate that design approach, a design like that of Bandai Namco or Kojima Productions' website is something that I find really interesting. The sites use a lot of images and although text heavy they seem to pull the user's focus by having the text imposed on these images. Both websites seem to use a specific primary and secondary colour for everything, this seems to follow Issacharoff's (2021) idea that when making a design guide you should select your colour palette according to colour theory as well as having a main, secondary and tertiary colour as well neutral colours (something i had never considered). I'm sure there's many other colours on these two pages that I'm not quite noticing since they aren't as apparent but I believe they follow this quite well. This is a design principle I want to carry to my own website. A lot of the content is located in different pages and both sites seem to have some of this content located on the homepage. This is something I didn't quite take into account when initially planning content on my own homepage, I had previously planned to make the homepage include a simple welcome message with no additional content and a background image for set dressing. For user experience I don't want them to feel exhausted once they scroll to the bottom of my pages, I know I dread scrolling back up and often look for a "back-to-top" button which a lot of websites don't seem to have. Kojima Productions is a website that does have this and I think that little touch makes the experience of being on there quite enjoyable. The Navbar's for both are also equally responsive on both mobile and desktop, and have small opening and closing animations further enriching the experience, although I believe that I prefer KP's approach in that they have a nested menu inside of their primary one, I can see this working quite well for listing my blogs. Button feedback is also something I wish to include, I think adding a box shadow along with scaling up the element along with switching out the text's and bg's colors should work well. Although I want my website to have a soft feel so perhaps a slight border radius would serve me well. To tie this back to my own website as it currently is instead of what it could be, I believe the content is clearly listed in the navbar in alphabetical order making it less difficult to find. Each page seamlessly leads to the next and each blog post has its own page avoiding unnecessary clutter by dividing them up, lessening the risk of a sensory overload. This was made with the user in mind, I often visit websites that are too information heavy and get overwhelmed quite quickly, I believe keeping each page simple helps the user concentrate on the point being conveyed. Each blog has its own link located on a "blog hub" page where user's can view truncated versions of my main articles before deciding which to read. The content is kept separate on each page with the only overlap I predict happening being on the design page with the wireframes along with research of other websites. I believe having a learn more button could be useful, although it would have to be in a way that keeps the page from being bloated, perhaps grouping together similar ideas in batches and linking them to the relevant design. This week I focused mainly on ease of navigation and making sure no page was packed with more information than necessary. Reconciling this with my homepage was a bit challenging but I think I kept the information limited while also letting users know enough about it to decide whether or not they wanted to continue exploring it.