The website also does a good job in interactivity. Meaning that the designer coded the website to seem like more of a multimedia feature rather than just a static interface. The first thing you see on the home-page is a scrolling menu. This menu illustrates the partnerships with big-time companies that Meograph has established. Establishing this credibility early is a good thing to do. As a user, I personally was intrigued that companies such as the NBA and TBS use the service provided by Meograph. With those being big multimedia organizations, I immediately want to know more about how this service is useful.

Another element that the website has done a good job with is the navigation. Most of what’s needed to know about Meograph is on the home-page. While there are multiple things that the website wants to get across, the spatial aspect of how each section is broken up is well distributed. Alike things are positioned together and bigger gaps as well are bigger headings are used to separate new ideas that are not so alike.

The “try it yourself” page of Meograph is put together strong in the sense that directions are clearly given. The way that the breakdown has been targeted to fit a first time user such as myself is easy to follow and easy to grasp. Arrows are pointing towards the next step, and illustrated media helps you navigate to whatever is needed to add. Additional examples are also given within this tool. These are examples that go beyond  what’s shown on the homescreen as full examples.

Today I began drafting my web essay using the Writer/Designer analysis questions as a guide. I decided that I was going to break up the essay into four different sections: General Overview & Rhetorical Analysis, Design Choices & Modes of Communication, Affordances & Constraints, and Presentation & Conclusion. I took all of my information that I had compiled through my exploration of Meograph and began to put it into a coherent essay form.

Why I Did It…

I think that breaking the web essay up into different pages is a good way to make it more organized and less overwhelming. I didn’t want to make a separate page for each category because I think that would make the project way to broad and all over the place, so I attempted to combine categories in a way that flows and makes sense and makes the web essay more concise. It was difficult at first to take my basic bullet point notes and turn them into an essay, but once I got into the swing of it it started to come naturally. The one thing that I was afraid of was repeating information in different sections, so I know that I will have to do some extensive editing to ensure that I don’t repeat myself or make the essay too wordy.

My Writer/Designer analysis questions

Navigational Structure: 

Yay

On my interrogation, I want to include navigation tools to help my audience read through my essay easily. I want to include hyperlinks so that there are multiple ways to figure out what I’m talking about and to provide extra assistance. I also really want to include my own experience with Masher on the page so the audience can see what I did with it and refer to it as they’re trying to figure out the application as well. It’s also important to include some contrast so the essay isn’t completely boring and deters my audience from reading my essay. I can do so through the use of color, headings & subheadings, bullet points and images.

Nay

I really don’t want to write huge blocks of text because it’s not easy to read. I also want to avoid overusing pages and images so that the whole document becomes confusing and distracting.

For example, now that smartphones are very prominent in society today, many people are using auto-correct and auto-complete based on the app they’re using at the time. When I’m texting, it can be infuriating to have to type something six times in order for my phone to understand that the auto-correct way isn’t the way I want to type. Auto-complete can also have its complications when I’m ordering food or clothes online and it auto-fills my information that is no longer correct so then I have to go back and fix it all. But then it catches on and fills in the incorrect information again if I press the enter button.

I see this problem in texting all of the time. My boyfriend and I send multiple texts back-to-back because we don’t take the time to complete our thoughts in just one text message. So he could be sending me up to eight messages at a time because he’s trying to fix a word but auto-correct keeps changing it to the wrong word by the time he presses send again and thinks he has it right. (I do this a lot, too).

The problem is, we still use our auto-correct because it’s better than having a bunch of mistakes that you made on your own. If we’re being honest, we would rather blame a technology than ourselves. Really think about it: the reason we keep auto-correct is because it’s easier and there are less problems to fix than if we just typed on our own. It could be because our thumbs are too big for the keyboard or we type too quickly and miss the right letters or we’re simply too lazy to write it all out.

So I guess I’ll settle for the constraints that come with auto-correct because it’s a pretty convenient tool that I definitely would love to keep around than get rid of.