NetDynam 2.0

The home page of Netdynam 2.0 provides a structured guide to the content of the blog. This post is about the links which are part of this structure.

Wordpress, a Content Management System (CMS,) is a kind of crutch. It templates design options having to do with structure. It provides options for implementing structure. Effective usability may or may not follow from various implementations. Also, in a group blog, usability is partly contingent on group members doing their own thing in same ways, same ways that reflect commitment to usability principles.

The structure of the current blog could be annotated to reveal what are its assumptions about structure, and, perhaps, usability. For example, what assumptions drive the vertical order of the sidebar? Implicit in those assumptions could be conceptions about what users might, could, should, do. What are the different goals users bring to the page? What brought them here in the first place? How was Netdynam 2.0 found? Etc.

Links.
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I’ve pointed colleagues here, and, over years, to usability Jakob Nielsen’s useit.com. Nielsen is the most prominent usability guru. Although, with the web having developed from its Mosaic days to encompass all sorts of functionality that wasn’t in play when Nielsen first started pondering usability, it is the case today that usability isn’t centered on any one set of singular principles.

How to make a web site that satisfies its own producers’ goals and the various goals of many types of users? Even without particularizing types (or varieties of) of users, it can be valuable to sort users by differentiating their generic objectives. These reflect the goals a user seeks to satisfy, in effect, when he or she is at the web page and when “in” their user experience of being at the web page for some purpose.

In other words, irrespective of the style of user’s use, there are the goals behind, or constituting his or her drive to realize specific ends via use.

From this, and as a matter of preliminary design, the focal points of user drivers may be identified in advance. For some web sites, the presumptive focal points may be several, for others the focal points may be many. At the extremes, a web page could provide a single piece of content, provide no other user options, or, by contrast, a web page could provide an overwhelming amount of options. Options tend to grow along with the growth of variety of content.

Usability issues also grow along with the increase in focal points and options. The over-arching issue is: how to bring order and user programming (or guidance,) to bear on optimizing usability.
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