Hammer Assignment #1

From: Jessica Hammer <hammer@fas.harvard.edu>

To: "Janet H. Murray" <jhmurray@MIT.EDU>

I chose one example of (I

think) excellent design and one example of bad design to discuss.

Doorboards, I thought, was one of the best-designed of the projects.

Navigation within the story was clear and obvious. Though the reader was

able to move both through time and space in hearing the story, the

navigation bar at the top helped keep chronology very clear; 'time' did

not advance until you had visited as many of the geographical locations as

you chose. Additionally, the format of having actual pictures turned into

imagemaps worked very well for the story. It engendered curiousity about

the real world that the photographs portrayed and encouraged the user to

explore that visual space. I also liked the fact that not every location

changed at each time period -- it really got me thinking about what was

likely to change, based on the story so far, so that I didn't end up just

clicking at random. My only complaint was that I think I didn't get a lot

of the plot because I don't know enough about MIT. =) On the other hand,

it was nice that the author expected the reader to be able to make plenty

of inferences from context.

Here is one specific URL that illustrates the above:

As for an example of (what I thought was) bad design, I chose A Tale of

Two Frums. Mostly, the overall navigation of the site was poor. While the

implication of the text seemed to be that the user was moving within a

physical space, the method of navigation did not reflect that paradigm at

all. The cryptic row of buttons on the bottom does not reflect the

assumptions that the author is encouraging the reader to make about how to

think about navigating the site. However, I also felt that the lexia were

too short to tell much of a story -- as a reading experience, I found the

story too short to be satisfying, as were the individual lexia.

Here is one specific URL that illustrates the above:

If I were redesigning the site, I would make one simple design change that

would make the story much easier to navigate. Since there only appear to

be three rooms, I would include a small graphical map on the bottom of

each page. By clicking on a room, you could stay in or go to that room --

they would be labeled, and you would have a label for where you were as

well. Also, I would color the three rooms according to the backgrounds

that the author chose for the frums, Mel A. Garg, and empty, so that the

user could see where they were at a glance, and would have a sense of how

that physical aspect of the story changed over time.