Tag Archives: peer review 2

Peer Review #2

Peer Review # 2 This week I am reviewing “VP COLLECTIONS” by Victor. 

Direct Link: http://vpcardcollections.com/blog/evolving-skies-is-the-best-sword-and-shield-pokemon-set/

Screenshot of VP COLLECTIONS By Victor

Theme and Customizations 

Upon first glance at the website, it looks visually appealing and exciting. It has plenty of contrast with the black and white styling. You can tell right away that the content will be about Pokemon in some manner with eye-catching Pokemon artwork on the home page. The website design is exciting and draws you in with lots of great pictures and an amazing about-me write-up of the author. I like that it introduces the author on the home page, where you find out about Victor’s passion for collecting cards. The theme choice looks very professional.

Site Structure and Layout

Kaptelinin, mentions “affordances” and explains that a good design is intuitive. This means website visitors should be able to know how to navigate a site using their intuition. I feel Victor’s site has been built using an intuitive design structure, which makes his site easy to navigate, it grabs the user’s attention, creates interest, and allows your eyes to wander to see what will come next. I love that the content of the website is easy to navigate. 

Usability and Accessibility

I noticed and appreciated right away that Victor included “One Click” an accessibility plug-in on his website. Homer Gaines mentions that 15% of the world’s population has a disability, which makes it important to consider accessibility in website design to be considerate to others that may experience visual limitations. This add-on enhances usability for Victor’s users. Victor keeps a consistent theme throughout his site and his sentences are easy to read.

Typography

In addition to the usability of websites, choosing a readable and appropriate typeface is important as well (Gertz, 2015). Victor uses a readable typeface that fits his theme. He uses contrast effectively which makes it easy to read and navigate. The bolded white categories and titles on the homepage are appealing against the dark artwork.

References

Gaines, H. [UXDX]. (2022, January 27). The four principles of accessibility [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUxx_sq2QdY

Gertz, T. (2015, July 10). How to sur­vive the dig­i­tal apocalypse. Louder Than Ten. https://louderthanten.com/coax/design-machines

Kaptelinin, V. (2014). Affordances. In M. Soegaard and R. F. Dam (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Interaction Design Foundation.

Peer Review #2

For this peer review, I was paired with Jack. You can access his website with this link that is provided ” jackdanielswhiskeyno7.com.” Jack has created a website where he can express his interests, such as photos of the city, nature, and some of the campus. He also posts about his interest in cooking. By the way, his cooking looks fantastic! Unfortunately, many people are in my PUB 101 class, and I haven’t been able to review this one yet. However, once I saw that I had to check his website out, I was pleased. I enjoy looking at what my classmates are doing to their websites.

Theme and Layout

As I started looking through Jack’s website, I thought he had it well organized, and all of his buttons on the top right-hand side took me to where it needed to go. However, while going through his site, I saw how his “Home” page flips through different photos that he has taken. This shows his authenticity because the pictures he provides have been taken by himself. In addition, the way he has his website is structured it is easy for others to use.

Customizations

When I came across the “through my eye” page, it brought me back to one of the required readings that our Professor provided in week 5. In the article “Digital gardens let you cultivate your little bit of the internet | MIT Technology Review,” in the first paragraph, Sarah Garner expresses that her website didn’t feel like her. Garner then came up with an idea to create a page that involved what she was interested in. Jack’s “through my eye page” reflects your “Digital Garden.”

Social Media Integration

As I go through your website, adding your social media pages to your website would be beneficial. I assume you have Instagram, and if I am correct, you probably post more photos of nature, the city, and the water. I would love to see more of your work, you take amazing pictures, and others would enjoy seeing more. But, on the other hand, I could only review so much because you don’t have much posted on your website. I am sure there is a valid reason why you are behind on the assignments we are required to do, but once you are all up to date on the mini assignments, process posts, and peer reviews, your website will come to life. I believe in you; you have done a great job so far! Keep up the excellent work. PS- You should open your own restaurant and display your photography skills.

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Live Like Joao

Live Like Joao
Food, Places and Everything About My Life

*Above image taken from Live Like Joao’s Blog

A PEER-REVIEW ON WEBSITE DESIGN

Live like Joao offers a personable and candid approach to food blogging. When it comes to creating his new blog, Joao’s honesty is refreshing; while this may be a daunting new task, Joao invites his audience into his inner thoughts as he navigates the unfamiliar waters of WordPress. According to the screenshots from Amanda‘s first peer review, Joao has implemented a lot of her recommendations and suggestions. Already, Live Like Joao is starting to have synchronicity between the website’s appearance and the content. To properly unpack the different design elements in this blog, I will be focusing on two important design umbrellas: user experience (UX) and User Interface (UI).

User Experience

Travis Gertz’s 2015 Design Machines: How to survive in the digital Apocalypse explains the UX design as how the website works, as opposed to how it looks. A hyper-simplified breakdown of the UX design category would include layout, interaction, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, research, and testing. At first glance, Live Like Joao seems to work pretty cohesively and sensibly. There are subtle cues throughout the blog that indicate where I should look or click. For example, both the BLOG and POSIEL tab on the top righthand menu have a little downwards arrow to indicate a drop-down menu. These exemplify what Victor Kaptelinin describes as affordances in his article The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction.

The search function right above the categories list is a really helpful tool, especially when looking for a certain page or post that I particularly enjoyed, but was unable to retrace my steps. Since this blog is fairly new, I wasn’t lost in the content and it was easy to find my way back; however, once there are more entries and if Joao chooses to continue this blog post-PUB101, I suspect that this search function will become a really handy tool.

While there are affordances that create direction throughout the blog, I still seemed to have encountered some problems with Joao’s BLOG section. Firstly, I noticed that there is a category for “Blog” and “Blog Post”. This seems counter-intuitive, as these categories seem synonymous. Kaptelinin underlines that “Good designs are intuitive“; hence, I would always recommend going through the website fully – as a sort of informal audit – and paying extra attention to what is intuitive to you. What comes up when you click certain links? Does it take you where you would expect it to? This brings me to my second suggestions: make sure that  the information is stored in the right place. For example, when I click the BLOG POST on the drop down menu, the only post that is available is the “Short Essay 1”.

User Interface

In contrast to the former, UI Design encompasses how the website looks as opposed to how it works. Gertz explains that typography, colour, forms, illustration, photography, and detail can all be found within this realm.

Caution: Do not read when hungry!

This blog does a wonderful job at capturing mouth-watering cuisine. From a UI design perspective, there is a great use of white space and visual contrast with images. Blog Post 1 does a good job of separating chunks of text and using different fonts, especially by bolding the Ingredients title. The other blog posts could benefit by following the great example from that first blog. For example, my eyes are yearning for more contrast in the text in the Blog Post 3. There is a beautiful photo of gorgeous cuts of meats – perhaps I should have waited until after dinner to write this review – followed by the restaurant’s information and a short review. To better accompany the bold image, I would make the text larger and create a small text box containing the restaurant’s pertinent information. Currently, the review is the smallest group of text on the image: all these small modifications would allow for the sections of the page to be more proportionate to each other, and allow the important information to stand out.

The beautiful rustic table of food that act as the blog’s cover page sets the tone for a visually-enticing food blog. Keeping this in mind, I would recommend continuing with this theme by adding more images throughout the blog: as we are unable to taste this food with our taste buds, we do so with our eyes. Therefore, it is important to describe or visually show these through images and videos, as is done in the first blog post. If at all possible, ensure that photos and videos are the same size or are complimentary to the overall page layout to allow for synchronicity and fluidity.

Overall, I enjoyed joining Joao on his adventures through WordPress and discovering exciting new restaurants around the Lower Mainland through his reviews. I look forward to seeing the progress and reading more content from Joao. The recipes, reviews, and personable tone leaves me  hungry for more!

Check out Live Like Joao here.