...
She goes to the Photos page, which displays different categories of photos. The relative sizes of the different categories is shown through the size of the pile of photos below each category name.
She clicks on the "Campus" pile, which leads her to a page displaying all of the pictures in that category.
...
Aaron logs on to Campus Connect and goes to Yale’s main page. He then goes to the Forum page and posts a reply to Maria’s question.
Learnability:
- This design uses the metaphor of the a student’s desk to display the different sections of the website.
- Photos in a student’s dorm room might be on a bulletin board while notes about a school would probably be a notebook. The forum are on a note cards to signify the way student prepare for test with questions on one side and answers on the other.
Visibility:
- The reviews are organized by tags in a word cloud model. The size of the word in the word cloud is directly proportional to the number of reviews that have that tag.
- The photos are organized on the bulletin board by the number of pictures. Under each topic, are pictures. Their density is again directly proportional to the number of the pictures that have that tag.
- The questions are organized by stacks of note cards. Each stack is a category and the higher the stack the more questions are in that category.
Efficiency:
- You have to go two levels until you actually reach content because of the word clouds at the the beginning of each category.
- The Main page isn’t as easily accessible.
Error Prevention:
- The user might have a hard time navigating through the website even though there are back buttons along with the menu bars. This design can be very easy to get over crowed.
- The Main page is just scattered around the desk. A user might have trouble finding something. (Like the I Spy game).