For this week’s HIST 697, we have read a few interesting things about design–both conceputal and practical–and there were a few worthwhile nuggets in each text. Most interesting, and least surprising, to me was the conclusion of the Stanford University study on evaluating a web site’s credibility: that users base their decisions on design more so than on any other feature of a website. I am conscious of my doing this as I surf the web–I won’t buy things from sites that don’t look nice, I won’t choose a doctor with an ugly website, and I’m more likely to revisit sites that are visually pleasing (and not just for inspiration in my design work). I commented on classmate Misha’s blogpost Readings on CSS issues, where she noted that in the pdf version of the article “Who Are You” by Luke Wroblewski the text was too small to read and there was too much white space. I have a large screen and, as Donald Norman’s article “Attractive Things Work Better” says, I must have been in a good mood so I was able to overcome the minor obstacle that was a poor format for the article (as opposed to the likely quite attractive book form).

I am seriously trying to get something done and -finally- create this website…it’s coming slowly.