Blog Assignment - Week 4

I have chosen Adobe website www.Adobe.com to discuss the user experience it provides. The moment you enter the site you get a grand and elegant design that makes you feel exited to explore more of the site. They have chosen a black background for the home page, which gives it the rich look. The viewer can get a fair picture of what the website provides (in terms of contents) from the home page.

The website uses Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to separate the content from the style i.e. they have used CSS to set font size, font colour, web page layout, background colour, alignment of tables and anything to do with style, for all pages. This ingenious way gives the designer of this website to present the design and layout of every page very similar to one another. This is done by linking each page to use the CSS style, so the repetition of code can be minimized. This enhances the user experience on the site, as the navigation through the site becomes easy and consistent.

The home page has clear navigation links with appropriate name that can channelize the user to the right information page with the click of a button. The main links that are presented in the home page are home, solutions, products, support, communities, company, downloads, and store. Each of the links mentioned (apart from home) have sub categories of links that takes you to other pages. for example if you mouse over products link (at the top) it gives you a list of the products the company offers or you can select a product from the home page itself. The company offers more then one link to access the same page, thus providing freedom of control to the user.

As I mentioned before the layout and design throughout the website is similar and maintained, which gives the user the ease of finding the links or objects. For example the search bar is always on the top right no matter what page you are viewing, this gives an easy visibility for quick spotting to search for information.

The website loads reasonably fast even though they have a neat functionality on the home page. They have embedded flash displaying the four options of Adobe Creative Suites on offer. One believes that Adobe solutions are designed and perfected masterpieces over time, the same philosophy would have been practiced during the development of their website. I was not able to find any defects or design flaw as such from the pages I visited, even if there was an issue, I am quite sure the Adobe team maintaining the website would solve the problem in a timely manner.

One thing that I thought the pages would have been better off was the alignment. Most of the pages content that I visited was aligned to the left, but I would have preferred it to have been aligned to the centre. This is more or less a personal choice, but then again they might have done the left alignment for a purpose...I wonder why!?