IH01-OnyiLam

From IEOR 170 Spring 2007

Onyi Lam IEOR 170 Assignment 1

Good Design: Retractable mouse

Traditional PC mice always come with a long cord to connect the mice to the back of the desktops. However, with the growing popularity of laptops, it is evident that traditional mice do not have the mobility that users demand. It is extremely inconvenient for users to carry an external mouse with a long cord because it tends to tangle up with other things and takes up a lot of spaces. Retractable mouse is therefore a very clever solution because it addresses the above problems with a simple device: retractable cord. It would be very nice if a retractable power adaptor can be developed based on the same notion.

Bad Design: Vault website interface

Vault.com is an online resource for job seekers. It provides detail descriptions of different industries and companies. Even though it is a great resource, its web layout was poorly designed and resulted in long loading time. The picture above shows the layout of the message board of a company. (Each company is given a message board for job seekers to exchange information about the company) Ads are present in three sides of the page and took up almost half of the space. In addition, all the titles of the messages were listed on the left. It is not easy for users to sort out a particular subject that they are interested in. It may also be helpful if they list all the messages under the same thread on one page, instead of having users to click on the specific message in order to view it. The color scheme of this layout also confuses the users because it is hard for them to differentiate between the main content and the ads. I think this website is designed this way because it manages to squeeze a lot of information into one page and also it maximizes ad spaces.

Proposed New Design:

In my proposed re-design of vault message board, there are less ads spaces. However, this layout is a lot cleaner and users can locate where the main information is easily. They can also go down to the page to reply the thread without looking for the button. If they want to go to a different company’s message board, they can just click on the company name and it will lead them to the page where all the companies are listed.