Our brand is a northwest clothing store that is functional for the Northwest weather, and fashionable at the same time. It draws inspiration from snowboarder and skiier clothing, but is targeted more toward a fashion crowd than actual athletes. We will sell thermals, flannels, heavy jackets, layering jackets, jeans, hats, scarves, and umbrellas.

Another interesting fact was the number of years worked at a job. The majority of people have been with their employer less than a year, with numbers decreasing consistently with every added year. I didn’t realize people switch work that often.

A final fact that caught my attention was the time since last raise. Almost everyone had gotten a raise within the last year. This was surprising especially with all the talk about the bad economy. It was good to see that even in rough times, web designers are still moving forward in their careers.

The documentary followed 3 students who stopped using computers for a few weeks. It was interesting to see how each of them reacted to not being able to use their computers. Some of them cheated, some of them lasted longer than others. But overall, all their lives were greatly impacted.

I was expecting the documentary to be more about disconnecting from technology in general. The students still used cell phones and other forms of computers that I would have considered cheating if I was doing the experiment. Plus, using a proxy was debated as cheating, but I thought that is should have absolutely been cheating. You can’t disconnect yourself from the computer if you’re standing over someone’s shoulder watching them check your email for you.

If I were to do this experiment, I don’t think I would have too much trouble not using computers for a few weeks (aside from homework for this class). If cell phones were included it would be much more of a challenge.

using the illustrator comps I tested the basic navigation of the site.

TEST SUBJECT: Michael (18 y/o male)

I asked him to find his way to a womens coat:
after a moments pause he found the main nav across the header and clicked on womens. from there he clicked on coats and then selected a coat. Didn’t seem to have any issues.

I asked him to go to the home page:
He clicked the “mode” logo. there was some hesitation, it seems like he was looking for a home tab in the nav. Not sure if that is because of the way the question was phrased or because he was more comfortable with a home button.

This testing was pretty basic, all in all it seemed that the nav and secondary nav was understandable for the user. After we get further along with the coding more testing will be good be for finalizing everything.

TEST SUBJECT: Micah (22 y/o male)

I asked him to find his way to a womens coat:
He quickly saw the nav on the top and clicked womens, then clicked outerwear.

I asked him to go to the home page:
He clicked the “mode” logo.

Other notes he had about the site:
The background picture is a little too dark, The two promotions on the homepage are hard to read, The alternate views on the product page should be all the same shape (curently 2 are squares, and one is a cutout of the item)

Web design is highly geared towards knowing your audience. I never really thought of the fact that the majority of the audience to any site I will ever design has special needs of some sort. It is important to remember that everyone is going to approach your website differently. Keeping this in mind while designing websites will help users.

The chapter mostly discusses how important it is to make the site easy to use, and how when you don’t do that, the user is likely to get frustrated and leave. Keeping information from the user is one way to frustrate them.  A good example of this is customer service phone numbers. Krug discusses how companies sometimes “hide” these phone numbers because every call costs the company money, whereas if the user can find it on the site, its much cheaper. In my opinion, it’s worth the extra money  to make the phone numbers easy to find. Once a user decides they can’t solve their problem on the website, they are probably already frustrated enough as it is. Also, some users reason for visiting the website at all is to get a phone number to call (possibly an older or less computer-savy user who would prefer talking to a person) Is it worth frustrating many users and possibly losing customers to save a few dollars?

The best way to keep a user happy is to eliminate unnecessary steps.  Knowing what is important information for the user and making them most accessible will encourage a revisit to a website.

This is especially true with larger sites that have complicated sitemaps. The sites we’re designing in class are fairly straightforward and, although it’s good practice to do usability testing on them, probably not as necessary as it would be on a huge site that a large team of people created.

One of the more interesting things this chapter talked about was the importance of testing early on in the site creation. Of course this makes sense, so changes can be made before it’s too late, but I didn’t do this with the device website because I thought it was necessary to have a working site up before testing could begin. Changes are much more difficult to make once the site is up and running because people don’t adjust to it as efficiently.  Anything that can be fixed early will stop things from being built wrong initially.