Post 03: Design Reflection

When researching for the design process, I discovered how an app or website must both be aesthetically pleasing and practical as I found many websites that didn’t get used simply because of bad visual design decisions but its functionality was easily useable and vice versa which encouraged me to research websites that had failed in both the functionality and visual aesthetics. When researching apps and websites with lacking visual aesthetics, I found the most common reason for this was that they were heavily text based and had little to no photos or colour included which created a dull and empty looking page. I also found that if colours were included in these text heavy pages, the colours would be carelessly thought out and just mashed together which therefore made the page look muddy and overwhelming due to the fact the colours clashed. On the other hand when I found websites and apps with good visual aesthetics but were lacking in functionality, the main root cause would be because the main navigational buttons where hidden as well as most other things for the sake of making the page look neater or to make more room for more visual aspects such as pictures or pops of colour. A clear success for my final design in my opinion, would be a final prototype that is functional while having carefully selected colours that don’t clash and clearly visible text that is carefully placed in a way that doesn’t look overbearing. I would also want everything to be easily accessible which would mean my navigational tab is in clear view and is labelled correctly so the user knows exactly what button would take them to what page and what button would take them to the landing page. I think this is especially important as art museums have a wide age demographic which would mean some users might not be as technical as others and this is a way to keep things as easily accessible as possible.