This lab should be done in pairs or as a lab sub-group, if possible. Complete the exercises below and submit your lab results to Kit. Make sure you have included the names of all lab partners in your document. (You may use this this Markdown template for your write-up, if you like.)
Review the various sets of UI principles and guidelines covered in the User Interface presentation from class (Nielsen's 2003 usability components, Fadeyev, Oppedisano, Sollenberger, and Gestalt Design Laws) and the additional principles and guidelines in the Additional Resources readings (Hobart, Raskin, and Tognazzini). Develop your own set of between 6 and 10 criteria.
Browse enough web sites in four of the web page categories below so that you find two examples in each with very different characteristics. You could find one example of good design and one example of bad design for a category, or two examples with different good and bad points. Write up a set of comparisons of the good and bad design components for the two sites you chose in each category, using the set of UI principles you developed in Part I.
Note: to write up four meaningful comparisons, you will need to look at many more than just eight web sites.The web page categories are:
Information-heavy web sites (e.g., encyclopedia pages, departmental pages in the K catalog, pages presenting census data or other governmental information sites, pages with W3C technical information)
News or sports organization sites (e.g., CNN, NY Times, ESPN)
Retail sites (e.g., Amazon, Sears, LL Bean)
Social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)
Search/Reference sites (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, dictionaries, Ariadne -- the College library catalog)
College web sites, or some other category of your choosing (say what the category is)
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