Week 1 Wireframe Analysis
As a follow up to my technical blog post for this week here, I've broken down the layout visually for the three sites I assessed.
Gmail offers a webmail portal that used to not be common and usually weren't that good, but now Gmail.com is one of the most common ways of accessing e-mail to the point where various organizations rely on it to manage their e-mail network rather than maintain it themselves. The difficulty with webmail is that a lot of people keep an ever-growing amount of e-mail messages in the system, so it could mean lengthy lists of e-mails and pages that show them, but Gmail gets around it in the same manner that previous webmail portals have by separating them into pages of 50 or so messages.
Facebook has the most unique problem on the three in that it is a news feed that continues to grow and dynamically changes without refreshing. Here the implementation of different pages for all the stories don't make much sense, so stories are separated into bursts instead. In this manner, only the most recent burst shown when the page is loaded and the next burst is only loaded if the user scrolls to the bottom of the page where the last story of the initial burst is shown and at that point, the new stories are dynamically added and the page lengthened. This is repeated if the user scrolls to the new bottom of the page.
Gopher Puck Live is a lot like Gmail where message board threads are created, extended, and deleted. It isn't so dynamic where it has to be a fluid design like Facebook, so like Gmail the list of threads is broken up into pages that can be "flipped through" like the long lists of e-mails on Gmail.
