A branching diagram
shows each page on a site and how it's related to the other pages on the
site. A page architecture maps out the kinds of information on each page,
or each type of page, in the Web site. (DiNucci, 1998.) This assignment
contains two parts. First, sketch the branching diagram AND the page architecture
of the Faculty Trends Web site at http://www.utexas.edu/cc/cit/facweb/.
Second, write a brief critique of its suitability to the site's purpose
based on the principles of user-centered design.
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Critique
The faculty trends
page contains many informations. From the point of content, I think the
page is suitable for its purposes. The page includes information about
web course development, such as the excellent course web pages, the web
course development tools, references, and so on.
But from the users'
aspects, the page is not fully sucessfully designed. From the glance,
I first saw the four images about publishing, template, database and webcourse
and I thought they were some special features in the page. When I clicked
on it, it led me to another page and popped-up another menu. I was confused
about the relationship between the page and the main page and I was not
sure where I was. Then, I looked through the session on the main page,
it seemed clear that the image-part links were some subsites of the main
page. Continually, I browsed every session, and at this time, I found
that the 4 image-linked sessions were actually the subsessions of the
Workbench. I went back to the main page to look again to figure out how
the subsessions were arranged. I found the links at the bottom of the
page had made some distinguish between the 4 links and other links, but
the links at the top part of the page did not make such sense for me.
Therefore, I did not think the page was clearly structured and the users
might get confused at the complexed structure of the page.
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