April 15, 2007 Lexia

Lexia to Perplexia is a good name for the website because I was pretty perplexed. I would totally agree with Talan in that the reader truly creates the experience. You have to interact with this website and follow your own path and produce your own narrative in order for it to be effective and it actually having a purpose for the reader. This pattern is so complicated with a tangle that is seemingly hard to get through and get back. Once you start clicking, you are unable to return to the orginal site that you started from (without pushing the back button). There were so many options and possibilities that it created a whole new definition of the reader. There is no navigation pattern, just tons of possibilities for people to experience.

I liked the Cracked Mirror and thought of its pattern as a cycle. The beginning page allows the reader to follow one of four paths but once path is exhausted, you would need to back track to previous pages in order to follow another track that will eventually end and so on. So it is a cycle pattern according to Mark Bernstein. Out of the four links, i liked this design the best. The broken glass really gave a certain tone to the page that stayed consistent with the poems. It was simple yet gets the point across to the reader. It also made it more genuine (not a cookie-cutter website), so I'm more inclined to believe this writer's work. The Navigation was difficult as one had to push the back button once the track ended to return ot the index page. However, it is difficult to have all the links there without distracting from the text.

In Life with Father, the pattern that I saw was a more tangled pattern. The sit had a variety of links but no clear direction on what links to start with or how to navigate within the links (some where just text, others were links to other sites, etc.). The link names do not convey any sequential order to the site, so the decision is entirely up to the reader as to which path to take and the sequence in which to take them. The design of this site was a bit confusing, but also simple and clean. There were very little distractions in the way of design elements or flashy extra things, so that the reader could concentrate on the content of the text and not the look of it.