My Own Website!

I created a website to promote myself for future job opportunities.

I plan to continue to update this website as my resume grows larger.

"Meet The Elements" Review

The Five Planes

1. The Surface Plane - On the surface you see a series of web pages, made up of images and text. Some of these images are things you can click on, performing some sort of function such as taking you to a shopping cart. Some of these images are just illustrations, such as a photograph of a product for sale or the logo of the site itself.
2. The Skeleton Plane - beneath that surface is the skeleton of the site: the placement of buttons, controls, photos, and blocks of text which is designed to optimize the arrangement of these elements for maximum effect and efficiency-- so that you remember the logo and can find that shopping cart button when you need it.
3. The Structure Plane - The skeleton is a concrete expression of the more abstract structure of the site. The structure would define how users got to a page and where they could go when they were finished there and the structure would define what those categories were.
4. The Scope Plane - The structure defines the way in which the various features and functions of the site fit together. Just what those features and functions are constitutes the scope of the site.
5. The Strategy Plane - The scope is fundamentally determined by the strategy of the site. This strategy incorporates not only what the people running the site want to get out of it but what the users want to get out of the site as well.

Building From Bottom to Top

• These five planes provide a conceptual framework for talking about user experience problems and the tools we use to solve them.
• On each plane, the issues we must deal with become a little less abstract and a little more concrete. On the lowest plane, we are not concerned with the final shape of the site, product, or service at all--we only care about how the site will fit into our strategy. On the highest plane, we are only concerned with the most concrete details of the appearance of the product.
• Each plane is dependent on the plane below it.
• You should plan your project so that work on any plane cannot finish before work on lower planes has finished.

A Basic Duality

• People use the terms interaction design, information design, information architecture interchangeably.
• They use these words in different ways.
• When the web user experience community started to form, its members spoke two different languages. One group saw every problem as an application design problem, and applied problem-solving approaches from the traditional desktop and mainframe software worlds. The other group saw the web in terms of information distribution and retrieval, and applied problem-solving approaches from the traditional worlds of publishing, media, and information science.
• If you split the planes down the middle and on the left put those elements specific to the web as a platform for functionality and on the right put the elements specific to the web as an information medium.
• On the functionality side, we are mainly concerned with tasks--the steps involved in a process and how people think about completing them. here, we consider the product as a tool or set of tools that the user employs to accomplish one or more tasks.
• On the opposite side, our concern is what information the product offers and what it means to our users. Creating an information-rich user experience is about enabling people to find, absorb, and make sense of the information we provide.

The Elements of User Experience

• By breaking each plane down into its component elements, we'll be able to take a closer look at how all the pieces fit together in the courses of designing the whole user experience.

The Strategy Plane

• User needs are the goals for the site that come from outside our organization--specifically from the people who will user our site.
• We must understand what our audience wants from us and how that fits in with other goals they have.
• Product objectives can be business goals or other kinds of goals.

The Scope Plane

• On the functionality side, the strategy is translated into scope through the creation of functional specifications: a detailed description of the "feature set" of the product.
• On the information side, scope takes the form of content requirements: a description of the various content elements that will be required.

The Structure Plane

• The scope is given structure on the functionality side through interaction design, in which we define how the system behaves in response to the user. 
• For information resources, the structure is the information architecture: the arrangement of content elements to facilitate human understanding.

The Skeleton Plane

• Breaks down into three components
• On both sides, we must address information design: the presentation of information in a way that facilitates understand.
• For functionality-oriented products, the skeleton also includes interface design, or arranging interface elements to enable users to interact with the functionality of the system.
• The interface for an information resource is its navigation design: the set of screen elements that allow the user to move through the information architecture.

The Surface Plane

• Regardless of whether we are dealing with a functionality-oriented product or an information resource, our concern here is the same: the sensory experience created by the finished product.

Using the Elements

• This model, divided up into neat boxes and planes, is a convenient way to think about user experience problems.
• Within each plane, the elements must work together to accomplish that plane's goals.
• Content is king on the web. It's the most important thing on the web.
• Technology can be just as important as content in creating a successful user experience.