Portfolio: Usability, Wikipedia and Inform 7

In the last few weeks our Writing for the Internet class has studied both usability testing and Inform 7. Usability is essentially the quality that describes how easy a website, or anything is to use. We read "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, which discussed the importance of usability as well as strategies for testing and improving it. We also discussed interactive fiction. We read/played several works and studied Inform 7, a piece of software designed for writing interactive fiction. In studying Wikipedia we discussed its validity as a research tool. We then compared the content of several articles, eventually edited some of that content and discussed our experiences.

I think I've done a good job covering the readings in my blog entries. I wrote a great deal about Krug's book and usability in general. I also applied some of the concepts discussed in the book to Windows Vista. When discussing Wikipedia, I wrote about the two opposing articles regarding wikipedia.

As usual, timeliness is my weakness. The blog about the first part of Krug, was however, posted the day before class, rather than in the early morning hours of the day of class.

The blog that recieved the most comments was again the one on the first part of Krug. I guess this illustrates the advantage of posting early.

Depthwise I think I did a pretty good job. The one I wrote about usability of Windows Vista really showed my ability to apply the ideas learned in the readings to other things. I also think my blog on Krug's chapters 7-8 really offered in-depth commentary on the ideas discussed in those chapters.

I did a much better job this time of commenting on peer blogs, but find it almost impossible to locate any of the blog entries I did comment on. If there is some simple way to do this, I'd like to know what that is. That is so far the only disadvantage of not waiting until I'm in the midst of writing the portfolio to comment on people's blogs.