This week, we were required to visit several web sites, one of which was Boxes and Arrows located at http://www.boxesandarrows.com. Boxes and Arrows is a peer-written online journal that is dedicated to the practice, advancement and discussion of all types of design such as graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and the design of business. The goal is to welcome contributors who want to inspire thinking, push limits, and teach new things. I thought it was excellent and it has a wonderful visual design. I spent about an hour reading the stories and ideas that people have posted. The forum was great and their section on case studies and interviews was amazing. Additionally, the site navigation is extremely simple.
Another site I visited was the Google news aggregator called NewsMap located at http://newsmap.jp/. While the site was easy to navigate, I was really quite overwhelmed by the visuals with all the news stories. When the page first came up, I was quite taken aback by all the news stories being shown in those brightly colored blocks that were in all different sizes. It was quite distracting and took a second for me to sort it out. This would not be the first place that I would go to for news updates.
Lastly, we were also told to visit the site of Amazon at http://amazon.com/, Yahoo at http://www.yahoo.com/, Google at http://www.google.com/, and Ebay at http://www.ebay.com/. I am quite familiar with the capabilities of the first three sites and have used them extensively for both school and personal activities. I have always been satisfied with the results I have obtained when using the sites and all three are easy to use. In the case of Ebay, I have less experience with this site, but the few times I have used it, I noticed how the visual design was good and it has a lot of options. Using the search engine was a bit difficult, as you have to be really specific about what you are looking for otherwise you will be overwhelmed with results. Otherwise it’s a great site.