User Experience Fundamentals

For this assignment, I was asked to watch the Lynda.com User Experience Fundamentals tutorial and give a summary of what I learnt and the concepts that I will like to go more in-depth later. I was also asked to submit a copy of my certificate of completion. The tutorial highlighted how to tailor a website to an audiences need and increase user experience.

From this tutorial, I learnt about Navigation structure and how you should develop it based on the message of your site and what you want users to do after they know what your site is about. Menus and pages should be arranged based on categories, the audience or task of the visitors. A lot of menus should not avoided and also drop menus because it might disinterest the user after sometime. Also the position of your menus also matter, putting them horizontally up top when there is less and putting them vertically at the side when a lot.

I also learnt about forms and information. Sites should ask users for information at the right time, when they have seen value in the site. For example, a shopping site should ask people to create accounts or give information when the person is trying to purchase an item. You see here that the person has made a decision to actually go invest time in your page and won't mind giving information to make the purchase unlike a site asking a person for information when they first open it. This might make that person insecure because of how they don't know what lies ahead.

Lastly, I learnt about ads and how website owners should be careful of the ads they allow on their sites. Ads that discomfort the users, cause users to click away from your site or don't exactly portray the message of your site should be avoided. Let the ads on your site be relevant to your site and honest.

Website owners should build their whole site with the users in mind and this is the general message that I have gotten from this tutorial. I cannot wait to move further in this class and learn about how to create landing and category pages, which are things that really caught my attention from the tutorial.

When creating the websites that I have to for this class, I will make sure that my site is relevant to the user and is based on their needs and tasks.