In our recent discussions of usability of websites, I can’t help but want to critique the website of Pine Lake Pastures, where I take horse riding lessons.  The site, www.pinelakepastures.com, does not violate many of the top ten no-no’s that we learned about, but it does have a lot of ambiguity, typo errors, and things that just plain don’t make sense.

 Cheri, the owner and trainer, does not hide her prices at all which is a good thing according to Jakob Nielsen’s list.  In fact her prices are the first thing that opens up when you visit the site.  The prices listed are vague and confusing to the reader, however, which hinders understanding.  See the image below of her pricing section.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

More questions are raised in the site’s “The Herd” and “For Sale” sections.  “Slider”, a horse, is listed in both sections. Slider’s age is not listed however in the “For Sale” posting, and as I look at the posting of him in “The Herd” section, it says he is ten years old and the post was written in March, 2012.  That means that Slider is really now 11 years old and so her posting is miss-leading if the reader pays no attention to the date it was posted.  Furthermore, an interested buyer that perhaps saw him in the “For Sale” section would not know the horse’s age unless they stumbled upon him in “The Herd” section as well.  It is my opinion that these small issues do affect the site’s usability because a reader is not able to obtain a clear answer while browsing the two sections of the site. 


(Please note:  The last three pictures in this post will not let me enlarge them as the first one has.  I am perplexed by this and have fought with "Blogger" for a while now trying to make them bigger.  I give up.  Perhaps one could argue about the usability of this site?)
 
 
 
 
 
 
In the section of the site called “Meet the trainer”, it is stated that Cheri has a business degree, which is meant to boost her Ethos.  Cheri takes an Ethos hit however, due to many misspellings or grammatical errors throughout her entire web page.  For example above, Cheri says “Slider is one of my favorite horse at the farm”.  In the “Meet the trainer” section too, there is a grammatical error which makes the reader stumble.  The second sentence reads “…back in college when she learn to ride”.   It is ironic to me that even with a business degree, her page is far from perfect.
 
 
 
I have been going to Cheri for several weeks now for riding lessons, and have been trying to figure out how to someday mention to her that I am going to school for Technical Communication, and I could help spruce up her web page for her.  How does one make such a suggestion without hurting someone’s feelings and undermining their education or sense of concern for detail regarding their business?
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
0

Add a comment

In class, we discussed Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics," which is really the seminal work in well, understanding comics.  McCloud discusses just about every, and any aspect of comics that can be conceived, and our discussion on 'gutters' was interesting, as I hadn't read "Understanding Comics" in some ten years.

As an avid comics fan (buff?), I had always been told that Neal Adams was one of the genre-defining comics-book artists of his day (which happened to precede me by some 15 years).  As you can see in the examples to the right, his use of panel arrangement was completely "outside-the-box," to coin a phrase that came up in class.  That is not the interesting part, however.

Trap. The combination of the genres of trance and rap usually through sound mixing and editing, has become a staple of parties and festival shows. They share similar use of synth, heavy base and spoken words to create music. But what interests me out of these is the artwork and how the artwork mimics the mixing of themes between rap and techno much in the same way the music does.

Arguably one of the most recognizable symbols in the Western cultural lexicon, or even that of Eastern cultures, is the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. Popularized in the late 1920s by a series of short films, America’s favorite rodent has come to represent the Walt Disney Studios and the Disney corporation at large.

The above comic by Robert Berry appears in his Ulysses “Seen” adaptation of the James Joyce novel Ulysses.

We watched "The Machine is Us/ing Us" and had an interesting class discussion on whether it was a scholarly work or not. It was not, perhaps, “scholarly”; but it was an argument, and it made me think about the sociology of internet communication.

During our in-class discussion of Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art," the composer brought up gutters, the space in between frames of a comic (or newspaper, cartoon or other media).  In a comic, as McCloud states in the image to the right, gutters "play host to the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics."  These gutters are vital, and can serve as more than a space to let the reader's mind wander.

When we talked in class about usability and the internet, it sounded like the conclusion as to what makes a usable website is simplicity. Creating a website to serve a very obvious purpose is the key to usability. But even when a site is usable, there are aesthetics that make a website a more enjoyable experience for the user. Color, formatting, and graphic elements can enhance usability by making a website visually appealing.

In Vitaly Friedman's article "10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of," the first item listed is  problematic hidden login links on websites. Friedman uses Backpack as an example because the login link is very small and placed right underneath a block of text that looks like an advertisement, rather than placing the login somewhere else on the page where it can be easily located.

-->

Of the recent readings for this course, I feel most compelled to comment on the writings of Jakob Nielsen. I had heard of him before, touted as the leading expert of usability. A great deal of the discussion in class was devoted to some apparent contradictions between his ethos and one of his now defunct websites. However, I noticed contradictions on the very page we were asked to look at for class.

Professor John Logie teaches us that comics have a place in academia. He teaches it in Visual Rhetoric. Why not? Comics are visual and they are graphic and they are certainly full of rhetoric. Comics teach us to engage ourselves with the comic we are viewing, on our own time, in our own space. Professor Logie teaches that Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" is an essential book to do just that, understand comics.
Blog Archive
Contributors
Loading
Dynamic Views theme. Powered by Blogger. Report Abuse.