Designing Heavy Content Web Sites: Issues and more

modified from http://ijhcs.open.ac.uk/shneiderman/shneiderman-nf.html

As in any media, criteria for quality vary with the genre and authors' goals. A dizzying diversity of websites are emerging from the creative efforts of bold designers who merge old forms to create new information resources, communication media, business services, and entertainment experiences. Websites can range from a one-page personal biography (Figure 1) to millions of pages in the Library of Congress's American Memory project organized by the National Digital Library program (Figure 2).

Figure 1: One page personal biography of Ara Kotchian, a student at the University of Maryland (used with permission). [http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/People/ara/index.html]

Figure 2: American Memory home page from the Library of Congress, offering more than 5 000 000 images, texts, videos, etc., by the year 2000. [http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem]

Goals:

• visual appeal
• comprehensibility
• utility
• efficacy
• navigability