Tools for Information Literacy ⑧ Design thinking

Design thoughts

Remembering what we talked about earlier ... plan your website

Keep the users in mind as you design your site.
Ensure that the users are never confused about where they are in your site structure.
Ensure that your design speaks for you.

Take a few minutes and decide on a "theme" for the page(s) you are creating. Decide the structure of the site and what images you will need.

How to assist your users in finding their way

Wayfinding has four core components:

Orientation Where am I am right now?
Route decisions: Can I find the way to where I want to go?
Mental mapping: Are my experiences consistent and understandable enough to know where I've been and to predict where I should go next? Can I make a coherent mental map of the spaces I have seen, and use it to predict where to go next?
Closure: Can I recognize that I have arrived in the right place?

And then, think about design in the larger sense, how good design helps us do what we need to do, and design hinders us.

You want to consider that the development cycle for web sites has four stages:

The first stage is to develop content and format in tandem
The second stage is to view the results
Third, to make repairs as necessary. At this time you will either return to the first step to add content, or go to the fourth step
Fourth, publish the page