Assignment Page
You will create a web page that is meant to inspire and facilitate some kind of physical action from an particular online audience.
This target action should entail more than simply clicking, navigating, and skimming web pages. It should require the visitor to perform an action that has consequence in the physical world.
- to attend an event,
- to buy something and physically use/consume/read/watch/listen to it
- to print and read something,
- to donate money,
- to write an e-mail,
- to sign up for a service in the physical world
- to participate in a collaborative online project (that might entail physically collecting, posting, creating, photographing material)
If this project is created for an individual, club, or business who has an existing web site, you should make this project a companion site or sub-site to the original, and consider to what extent you want or need to make your project echo its visual styles.
Beyond Digital Existence
If the action is accomplished through online means (such as filling out a form), it should involve providing information or original material from physical space and have some kind of physical consequence.
Target Action
The Action Project should be focused: everything you include (and how it is presented) should serve a specific, clearly defined goal: to inform, motivate, and enable your intended audience to perform one specific action or sequence of actions. Sometimes, this action may require a series of steps or sub-actions, but these steps should also result in a clearly defined, single action.
Usability, Visual Hierarchy, and Screen Real Estate
In class, we will discuss principles of usability and home-page design , and of Visual Hierarchy and Screen Real Estate. Your project should reflect a thorough understanding of both the details and the philosophy of these principles.
Persuasion of a Particular Audience
More than a mechanical exercise in page design, this project calls for you to choose/create and bring together
- relevant information and explanations that enable the action, with
- visual and verbal appeals that motivate it.
These rhetorical appeals should be very thoughtfully aimed at a particular audience and their tastes, values, knowledge, preferences, etc. For example, children might be moved by very different appeals from retirees, high-school-aged students, or parents.
Don't Get in the Way of What's Already Working
Avoid creating a page that duplicates what's already out there on the web.
Doing so is not only unoriginal, but can cause confusion and even wind up preventing the action you want to see happen. For example, imagine a well-meaning page that aims to increase pet adoptions from the local shelter. Without meaning to, this page competes with the shelter's own web site and risks interfering with the clarity and authority of its message.
Commentary
Write and turn in a 500-word commentary following the standard guidelines, using MLA citation and documentation format. Your commentary should also
- clearly define
- why you created the site,
- on whose behalf (if yourself, in what capacity or role), and
- for what intended audience
- explicitly specify the action that is your target, and why that action matters
- explain how the visual design of your page employs the principles of visual hierarchy and usability,
- specify the ways that your page fulfills the ideals described in the Evaluation Checklist for this assignment
- analyze the visual and verbal techniques of persuasion that your page deploys to move your audience to take the desired physical action.
Criteria
See the Evaluation Checklist for details on the criteria used to grade your page.
Resources
- Usability Touchstone
- CSS Zen Garden
- Implementation
- Give Thanks
- Enjoy the Free Salsa Class and Make a Difference
- Help Save Community
- Aristotle: "Rhetoric is the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion."
- Visual hierarchy and screen real estate
- Bad Boys Bail Bond (tag lines)
- Personas and Scenarios