My INFM372 Class Blog

Amazon Heuristic Failure: Aesthetic and minimalist design (Heuristic #8) . Amazon is a very successful and widely used shopping website, but I find that its main website is actually rather poorly designed from a user convenience perspective. Upon opening the site I am immediately bombarded with five huge advertisements some of which are not at all relevant to how I or most normal expected users of Amazon would use the site (purchasing groceries, ordering food, and other niche promotions). The useful links to press are relegated to tiny words at the top of the screen and some smaller promotions near the bottom. This clearly violates usability Heuristic #8: Aesthetic and Minimalist design  in several major ways. Additionally, there is a major issue when buying multiples of one item. One woudl do this by selecting the item and using the drop-down menu found on the right above the "Buy Now" button. The price displayed above this drop-down menu will always display the price of j...

1) Ezgif.com Occasionally I will have a need to turn a moving image file from one filetype to another. For example, I might need to turn a GIF file to an MP4 file or vice versa in order to use that file on a site or for a project that requires a specific file type. In this situation I tend to use ezgif.com: As can be seen in the above image, Ezgif.com has a very simple and minimalist interface which is free from most extraneous or irrelevant information that might distract or detract from the visibility of the actually useful information (minus the unfortunate exception of the large, attention-seeking ads which are a necessary evil due to the website's business model of being free with ads).  Thus, this site fulfills the Heuristic Design princple of "Aesthetic and Minimalist design" for the most part (again, with the exception of the large and obstructive ads). However, the site has what in my opinion is a Rank 3 Usability problem which violates the "Error Preventio...