http://usercentereddesign.weebly.com/
Dream big!
Have fun!
Thank you!
The mission statement for this portfolio:
This eportfolio is based on the course of EDER679.27: User-Centered Design. I welcome all the audiences who are also interested in the field of Educational Technology to this portfolio, commenting on it, giving suggestions and conducting more exploration on it together. Especially for myself, I am hoping it can record my learning process of the understanding of the approach and practice of user-centered design and furthermore improve my learning outcome.
Justification for this portfolio:
This e-portfolio is mainly focusing on reading response, group project and some useful links, which I think basically meet the course requirements. During the construction of my eportfolio, I also got many enlightenment from the useful online resource—RBGW as well as Norman’s design book.
Norman(2005) pointed out that “attractive things make people feel good, which in turn makes them think more creatively (19). ” Therefore, I tried to make the portfolio attractive, at least, tried my best to obey the rules of usability.
The Blog’s Title—“Life is beautiful” is my blog’s title. It is more emotional other than academic, as I want to deliver my understanding that life is especially beautiful when filling with good user-centered designs.
Homepage—I prefer a neat and clear homepage. It is important to ensure that the homepage has all of the features expected of a homepage and looks like a homepage to users. A homepage should clearly communicate the site's purpose, and show all major options available on the Web site (RBGW, P34). Based on this theory, I put the main options on the top of the right hand on the home page. Obviously, from my home page, visitors can access to the class project and other sharing materials very easily. In addition, as one of the major tasks of the eportfolio, the weekly reading response was designed as the main content on the home page. It is very convenient for peer review and myself.
Reading response—I applied graphs, pictures, illustration and video clips to elaborate my understanding, along with my feelings to update weekly reading response. These gadgets I chose are somewhat related to the content of the reading response. I am a visual guy and pretty sure it helps visitors avoid getting bored and makes the response more readable. Especially, I am proud of the chosen video clips that correlate to the content I reflected upon, as it is not only for fun but also strongly support my ideas.
Wiki page for Project --As we know, wiki is a free web tool for a certain group to build a website. As the course project will be done by more than two persons, an individual blog is not convenient for all the group members to implement project management. Thus, we group decided to use wiki to show our project, which allow us to access to it easily and update it at any time.
Background and template—I prefer the website with light color and the template that is clear at a glance. As suggested by RBGW, it is very important to create a positive first impression of your site (P 37). As we know, we have several free templates to choose in blogspot. I chose this one as I thought this template represents simplicity and the orange color makes me feel warm, which causes positive affect that also proved by Norman in his emotional design book (P29).
Some improvements—I tried to further simplify the portfolio. You might notice that there are blog, weebly, wiki in the website, which causes several different layers for navigation and take more browse time. I have not yet found a perfect single website tool for eportfolio. Blog is only good for diary or journey; Wiki and Weebly is good for group project. However, when dealing with multitasks such as these in this course, one single tool is not enough at all. Thus, what I can do now is just to use different website tool for different task, which might complicate the portfolio. Anyhow, one crucial point I can ensure is that no matter visiting blog, wiki or weebly, visitors can go back to the upper layer and homepage from every page in the site (RBGW, P34).
Once again, the purpose for this e-portfolio is to record my study journey in this course. The non-paper note is a trend for 21st study. I hope it will be easy for me to review these useful materials in the future. My pondering is going on and I am convinced that my study journey will be more exciting with the development of educational technology.
References:
Norman, D. (2005). Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.
Online book-Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines. URL- http://www.usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines.html
