Interfaces

The Selfe article was pretty interesting because it pointed out a few things about interfaces that I had never given much thought to, especially the way in which they favor white middle to upper class men. The article states that the icons and navigational features of most computer interfaces are geared towards this group and feature an interface featuring objects that would be common in the daily lives of this group.

The Eat Me Drink Me article was a little more applicable to what we are actually setting out to do for this class to some extent, which is to make a website that is user friendly as well as visually appealing. The article discussed various aspects of interfaces such as navigation features that one may or may not want to use when designing a website as well as the use of wizards to help users work their way through certain features of a site. The best aspect of this article was the use of visual aids and how the author breaks down the strengths and weaknesses of different websites. This was a good way to help me start to form some ideas on how I would like my own website to look like and function.

I chose to look at the iTunes interface since I use it pretty much everyday For the most part I really like this interface. I think it's easy to use, and even somebody using it for the first time is able to grasp all the basic features. I do have a couple issues with the program's interface that I do not like. First, the tool bar is pretty confusing in some ways. When looking for more advanced features of the program -- especially since I switch between using the Mac and PC versions -- in the tool bar becomes confusing and it's sometimes difficult to find the option I am looking for. The other issue is that songs can only be classified by one genre, which makes sorting your music library tricky sometimes as some songs can fit into multiple genres. I think this would be something that would be easy to fix and make sorting music files much more convenient. Other than that I enjoy every other aspect of the iTunes interface, especially how a user can easily organize his files and add playlists with only a couple clicks.