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You have completed Practice Design Criticism!
You have completed Practice Design Criticism!
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Were you able to come up with a critique for the Books to Scrape site?
Resources
- Books to Scrape - This is the website you should critique in this practice session.
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Were you able you come up with a critique
for the Books to Scrape site?.
0:00
Let me walk you through
what I came up with.
0:03
First, the users I kept in mind
were the programming students
0:06
who use the site as an educational
resource to practice scraping.
0:10
They are looking for a realistic website
to practice gathering website content.
0:14
With these users in mind,
lets start listing out the strengths.
0:20
On the home page, I notice that
the site has a simple layout.
0:25
Each book is grouped with its details,
0:30
making it easy to know what
price goes with which book.
0:33
The warning message is clear and
it is in a hard-to-miss spot.
0:38
All of the clickable items are easy
to notice when you a hover over them.
0:44
Clicking on a book leads you to
a detail page for that book.
0:48
The detail page also has a simple layout
and utilizes some design patterns.
0:54
There's a photo of the book's cover,
a product description, a price,
0:59
stars to show how many people have liked
the book, and product information.
1:06
The navigation at the top of
the screen is breadcrumb style,
1:11
which means you can see the pages
that lead you to this detail screen.
1:16
When a website has a lot of pages, this
is one way to help users keep track of
1:23
where they are and
how they got to the page that they're on.
1:27
One last strength is that this site is
responsive and can be used on any device.
1:31
Now that we've taken a look at the
strengths, let's dive into the weaknesses.
1:40
The first thing I noticed was how close
the tagline was to the title of the page.
1:44
Adding more space between the two would
help give them space to breath and
1:48
make them two separate elements.
1:53
On the mobile version of the site, the
cyber menu moves to the top of the screen.
1:56
Seeing all the links at once can
be overwhelming to the user.
2:02
The links are also very close together
as well, which would be difficult for
2:06
a mobile user to tap on.
2:11
It would be great to use
a mobile design pattern for
2:13
the sidebar to make it easier
to navigate as a mobile user.
2:16
And on the product's detail page,
2:21
the one element I see missing
are the relevant reviews themselves.
2:24
Even for an educational site,
2:30
it would be great to have pretend
reviews to go with the given rating.
2:31
Reviews are becoming more popular and
would be another item for
2:37
students to practice with.
2:41
So let's recap.
2:44
The site does a great job of
getting programming students
2:46
a place to practice gathering web content.
2:49
It is simply designed,
with clearly visible, clickable elements.
2:52
The site also gives a fair amount of
warnings to remind visitors of it's
2:57
educational nature,
which are clearly placed on each page.
3:00
The breadcrumb style
navigation on detail pages
3:04
gives the user an easy way to keep
track of where they are on the website.
3:07
I would suggest adding space
between the website title and
3:13
its tagline to make it more clear
that they are two separate elements.
3:17
On the mobile version of the site,
3:20
I wish there was a design pattern to
make the navigation a bit easier.
3:23
And finally, adding in pretend
reviews to go with each book
3:26
will give students another
element to practice with.
3:30
Overall, the site achieves its goal, but
there's always room for improvement.
3:33
Critiquing sites in this manner can be
a great way to practice your UX skills.
3:38
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