Analysis
GD3990A fall 2014 · GW Corcoran School of the Arts and Design
Instructor: David Ramos (davidramos@email.gwu.edu)
This project offers a chance to start thinking about how to communicate the ideas behind a site, and how to evaluate the site’s function.
Choose two websites that serve similar purposes, audiences, and organizations: perhaps two colleges, or two restaurants, or two to-do list sites. Analyze the sites, seeking to understand the intentions behind them and evaluating their success.
Tell us:
- What the websites are
- Who the websites are for
- What each website does well
- The deficiencies of each site
Present your findings in ten to twenty slides that you’ll project on the screen. You can use screenshots of the site, words, and diagrams. Perhaps put screenshots on the screen and draw labels. No talking until afterwards. Still slides only, bundled into a PDF. You control how long each slide stays on screen.
Size your slides for a projector screen at 1024×768px or 1920×1080px, landscape.
If you show slides in a vertical format, you will fail this project.
This is good practice in analyzing websites and thinking about the subtleties of how they work. It’s also an introduction to documenting your design ideas.
Example visual explanations
These are examples to think about, not models to imitate. We’ll talk about formal documentation methods later.
