Design Critiques

It’s rare to actually enjoy visiting a health insurance website, and the site for my health insurance provider, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey (HorizonBlue.com) is no exception. The homepage for Horizon Blue is heavily focused on attracting new health insurance members, as opposed to serving its existing members. The welcome screen is […]

When a product is branded across platforms, it would be natural to assume (or at least anyone supporting good design would assume) that the platforms would compliment each other. While my Nook eReader is a few years old, and I quite enjoy the reading experience, I sometimes I don’t bring it with me and I find

The design of the popular flight and travel booking application Kayak frequently leaves users confused and reliant on their long term memory to make use of the app. The main appeal of Kayak is the ability to search and find a wide range of options from one screen, seen below. However, the app becomes difficult

Ravelry is a multipurpose, user-driven site for knitters and crocheters. It is part social networking, part immense pattern library. My use of it over the past 7 or so years has been primarily in pattern searching, but the site design, which is good by many of Norman’s principles, has not changed in that time. The most

When we were given this assignment, I quickly thought of the most annoying flaw on any of my semi-regularly used apps on my Android phone – getting past the home screen on the New York Public Library app. Which I hardly use anymore because I hate it. The website is infinitely more enjoyable for me

  I have chosen the Amazon.com website as an example of good design. I use Amazon.com from time to time to purchase merchandise and what’s great about it’s design is that it has good, visibility, affordances, feedback and constraints. One of the first things that I noticed on the homepage is that, it has a

There are seemingly an infinite different ways to get the news online these days, but one of my favorite content apps to use on the iPhone is The Daily Beast “Read This, Skip That” app, which is linked to the site TheDailyBeast.com. Their articles range from topics including politics, pop-culture, world news and more. Instead of

Instagram is a photo sharing app, which utilizes several of Don Norman’s principles for good design, which make it a user-friendly social media mobile app. (You can also make 15 second videos with Instagram but this blog will focus on the photo sharing aspects.) There are a number of constraints that make Instagram easy for

Feedly is an RSS aggregator available for Android, iOS, and through web browsers. I use Feedly primarily through Firefox, mostly because I find the mobile app too annoying to use. Upon opening the Feedly Android app, the first visible screen is the most recent story in the user’s first category. (At least I think it’s

Yesterday, I wanted to get a cup of tea before I went to work because I have been feeling a little under the weather. I knew there was an Argo Tea on University Place, close to my workplace, so I Googled “Argo Tea” and found myself on their website. And that was about all that