As we study user interface design and specifically web design, and as we also
prepare you to create your own web applications, we will need concrete examples
of good and bad design to talk about. So for this assignment, we're going to collaborate
to create a list of websites that are worth talking about. I hope you'll find
us examples of great, ordinary, and appallingly bad websites.
Your tasks
- Find examples of websites that are
- obviously based upon some sort of underlying database
- illustrative in some way of good or bad design: clear navigation,
terrible colors, confusing organization, too many words, etc.
- suitable for work (for example, we're not going to discuss
porn sites or the sites of intentionally racist organizations,
even if you think they're interesting from a design perspective, since
there are so many examples of excellent and terrible design without diving
into those areas)
- not yet posted on our Slack #examples channel
- For each website, post a link and a very brief (i.e. one sentence or sentence fragment) description of
the site on our Slack #examples channel. If you wish, you may also very briefly direct our attention
to a particular aspect of the website's design (e.g. "this page is a great example of the use of breadcrumbs"
or "this page violates Krug's 'a website should be a mensch' principle").
- By midterm, and the sooner the better, you should each have posted at least 3 examples.
If you want to post more, that's fine—keep 'em coming.
- Limit yourself to one website per post. It's fine to do multiple posts one right after the other, but
I want each individual post on #examples to be about one website.