Blog Topic #6: What is Experience Design

The Canadian Mercedes Benz Site is a very cool website that creates an interactive experience. The goal of the site is for you to explore the car company's B series line and show you all the features in an entertaining and convincing way.


Experience Design focuses on the User experience instead of functionality. The goal is to make the user feel or think a certain way. Designers pull from all backgrounds in order to achieve this goal including psychological studies.

Blog Topic #5: Usability

Usability.gov is a good resource for web usability.

Web Usability is all about efficiency. Does your design and functions help the sites ultimate goal?

Some basic rules are:

• Ease of use of the sites information architecture.
• Present information in a clear and concise way.
• Make navigation obvious, the path you want the user to follow.
• Limit likelihood of user errors on the site, make errors limit easily fixed.
• Put the most important element in the right place.

Blog Topic #4: Customize This

Blogger has some very easy to use customization tools, in order to make a fully customizable blog. If you know HTML it even lets you code your own blog.

For those who do not know HTML they have a ton of options.
Once you navigate to the layout page, you can choose from many templates or even create your own and upload it for others to use. From the layout you can change the page elements, the fonts and colors , the HTML or choose from one of the templates.

From the page elements you can edit your webpage layout. You can also add images, video or even audio to your page, you can even add a slide-show. You can take away or add gadgets which include some pretty cool stuff including; a search bar, your followers, plain text, any media or even ads.

Google offers ways to capitalize on writing a blog, you can generate revenue depending on your site traffic and the amount of traffic you send to your ad agency.

Blogger is a very easy way to start your own blog, the functionality is great and constantly improving.

Blog Topic #3: What is RSS?

What is RSS?
RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a technology whose general idea is instead of going to same websites to see if they have been updated, bring the update to you.

How is it useful and/or being used? Saves time, bandwidth and disaapointment of a site not being updated, hehe.

How can you use the RSS feed to track updates to your fellow student's blogs?
Although you could use Googles Follow or Freinf Connect button, you could also copy the url and add it to your subscriptions.

What's an aggregator?
An RSS aggregator (aka RSS Feed, RSS Channel, RSS Reader) is a program that checks all of your websites and organizes the new reults for you. Saving you the time and bandwidth of checking and visiting these sites.




Youtube - Lee Lefever - He explains it very well, even my parents can understand him.
Software Garden - Straight forward answers

I personally use Google Reader, but there are many choices out there.

Blog Topic #2: Can I get a resource?

Since many of us are students and since the economy is decresing the number of new jobs, many people are turning to contract work.

Freelance Folder

Freelance Folder is a pretty cool site. Yes a lot of the articles are very obvious but, then I just ask myself if they are so obvious how come I do not implement those ideas.

Freelance Folder has different types of articles that apply to different aspects of being a freelancer, incluging; Marketing, Productivity, How to and Lifestyle.

Blog Topic #1: Dude, this site is the coolest!

I was browsing online when I came along "The Webby Awards" One of the winners was
Conservation International.



Conservation International is a website trying to raise funds to protect rainforests. They market this really well by giving recognition to individuals that have donated, they even show the donater and others the acre(s) that they have helped save.


The design is very minimal and also very strong. It has a White background which gives a very strong contrast. The colors are Green, Orange, Black and White with various shades of these colors.
The designers main tool was Flash and have made the navigating or "exploring conservation" very interactive and fun. They use imagery that invokes strong emotions and the colors are very active but at the same time non-obtrusive.

If I were to change one thing it would be the layout, perhaps increase some of the spacing between certain elements.

Pixton Comics Inc.

I did quite a bit of browsing before I found something that I liked. I was originally going to present Redbull's Flugtag FlightLab flash game, which is a great example of branding a project. I decided against doing a presentation on this one, because our first presentation about Get The Glass by Lori Travers was so great that it would be tough to compete with. And it would also be a bit repetitive.

I stumbled upon Pixton Comics Inc. which is a social website that is fairly new. The website allows non-artists the ability to create comics with ease. It is very fast and very efficient.

Pixton Comics Inc. is located in Vancouver, Canada and has two creators Clive and Daina Goodinson. They used flash to create a comic book creator, that can create very individual characters that can be distinguished by age, gender, ethnic background, hair and body type. These characters are fully editable so you can add facial expressions or body movements to the character as the story progresses.


The idea is that people all over the world can join a community where they can create and share their comics amongst each other. They have contests occasionally where you can win prizes. You can publish your comic and it is instantly translated into over 20 different languages. Pixton is safe for kids as well. They have a language filter that censors offensive language and the users can vote and flag each others comics to be reviewed and removed if necessary.


I like how simple the design is for Pixton Comics Inc. It is very straight forward and I don't think many people will have trouble learning to use it. The learning curve seems fairly short. And is a fun way to express oneself. The website currently has only 7,531 members, but has been created this year.


For more info on how to use the site check out their trailer/tutorial at
http://pixton.com/trailer

If you want to learn more about their company and product visit
http://pixton.com/about

-Klarence OuYang