Blog Topic #5: What is Experience Design?

Me as a designer,I should know the needs of my customer.I should try to creat successful experiences for any kind of people.I should know the costumer's need and what do they looking for in the site that I design.My design should based on the consideration of an individual's or group's needs,desires,knowledge,skills...If I deisgn a site,I will let my users to experience new things in my site.This fact make my design more interesting fro them.Design is all about the people who use things.

“Important skills for everyone to have in the next decade and beyond are those that will allow us to create valuable, compelling, and empowering information and experiences for others. To do this, we must learn existing ways of organizing and presenting data and information and develop new ones. Whether our communication tools are traditional print products, electronic products, broadcast programming, interactive experiences, or live performances makes little difference. Nor does it matter if we are employing physical or electronic devices or our own bodies and voices. The process of creating is roughly the same in any medium.” [Nathan Shedroff (1994) A unified field theory of design]

Some examples:Bia2.com this is an Iranian site that I've found.I think this site is a good experience design site because it has everything in it.It has different kind of entertainment and users can experience new facts in it.

Blog Topic #3: Can I get a resource?

The first site that I've found is allgraphicdesign.About this site: All Graphic Design Resources Directory is a Portal of Graphics Software Resources, Desktop Publishing (DTP) Tools, Graphics & Graphic Design Resources & Links to Tutorials for Image Editing Graphics Software like Adobe Photoshop or QuarXpress. Links also to Photoshop Actions, Photoshop Filters & Plugins, Printing Design & Layout Templates, Graphics Software Information, Online Graphic Design Classes, Graphic Design Schools, Graphic Design Jobs, Design & Layout Articles, & our Popular Graphic Design Forum.
Second site that I've found is:bigwebmaster.It's a source for online tutorials,books,programs...

Another site called webdiner it has links to cool audio sites.

Blog topic #4 :What is usablility?

Usability is an approach to product development that incorporates direct user feedback throughout the development cycle in order to reduce costs and create products and tools that meet user needs.
There's something wrong with our computer systems. Much of our time is filled with frustration - websites and intranets that don't let us find the information we want, word processors that lose hours of work with a click of the mouse, remote controls that have more buttons than we could possibly need.
'Usability' is widely seen as the answer to many of these frustrating interactions with technology. There are usability books, websites, guidelines and checklists, so why are products and systems getting harder to use instead of easier?
'Usability' is an umbrella term that encompasses two related concepts:
1.Usability is an attribute of the quality of a system:
"We need to create a usable intranet"
2.Usability is a process or set of techniques used during a design and development project.

USABILITY TESTING:
Usability testing is a technique for ensuring that the intended users of a system can carry out the intended tasks efficiently, effectively and satisfactorily. Usability testing is a means for measuring how well people can use some human-made object (such as a web page, a computer interface, a document, or a device) for its intended purpose, i.e. usability testing measures the usability of the object. Usability testing focuses on a particular object or a small set of objects, whereas general human-computer interaction studies attempt to formulate universal principles.

A good design that had testing applied to it is even better, but more comments on this later. Usability testing tends see the trees instead of the forest. You tend to figure out "that button's label is confusing" not "movie and music players represent fundamenatlly different use cases". Because of this usability testing tends to get stuck on local maxima rather than moving toward global optimization. You get all the rough edges sanded, but the product is still not very good at the high level. A good designer will also predict and address a strong majority of "that button's label is confusing" type issues, so if you do perform usability testing you'll be starting with 3 problems to find instead of 30. That's especially important because a single usability test can only find several of the most serious issues: you can't find the smaller issues until the biggies can be fixed. In summary: with a designer you're a lot more likely to end up optimizing toward a global maximuum rather than a local maxima, AND if you do testing it will require far less usabilty testing to get the little kinks out.

Why is usability important to good design?Usability is important to web site design because if it's missing, the site can alientate or confuse the user, as well as detract from whatever your main message, product or service is.
Good design should be seamless, almost invisible.Good design isn't just about a web site looking cool, it's about helping the site communicate it's goal with as little effort as possible on the part of the user. If the site has strong usability, more people will notice how great the design is because they won't be wasting time trying to figure out how the site works.
some examples:
1.Adobe 2.Microsoft3.Dreamweaver MX 2004

Blog Topic #2: What is RSS?
RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.
RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.Imagine you want to write a program that reads RSS feeds, so that you can publish headlines on your site, build your own portal or homegrown news aggregator, or whatever. What does an RSS feed look like? That depends on which version of RSS you're talking about.

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper." Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being "pulled" to the subscriber, as opposed to "pushed" with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some "pushed" information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed.
Aggregator features are being built into portal sites such as My Yahoo! and Google; modern web browsers; e-mail programs
The aggregator provides a consolidated view of the content in a single browser display or desktop application. Such applications are also referred to as RSS readers, feed readers, feed aggregators, news readers or search aggregators.

cOOlEst SiTe

Blog Topic #1: Dude, this site is the coolest!

One of my favorite sites that I think It’s cutting-edge and well-designed is nimamusic site.Nima is an Iranian singer.The first time that I saw this site I though it’s a great one. I really like the animation and also the sound that you hear when you click on each option. A red color made this site more attractive. I think they were used flash and it’s a very modern design and because of this I like it. I like the first page and I think the whole thing is too creative. When you choose Gallery, album, Fan club or biography it will become more interesting. I mean the way that each page opens. It’s really hard to choose best site because there are too many of them out there.

There is another site that I really like its introduction.It's another Iranian site that related to a party in L.A.It called darbandpartyI like the design of the page alot and also the music that comes with it. There is not that much flash or 3D in it,but it attracted me.