Assignment 4_Ideal Sites & Aadoption of IM

1. Ideal Website

As a new medium and new platform, the main purpose in website design is to connect yourself or your organization with the public or potential customers. Thus, we should not only make the website looks “cool” but also make the information easy to be searched and understood.

I found some wonderful websites applying in business:

Nike http://www.nike.com/index.jhtml

With international view, they offer many kinds of languages on their homepage which shows their diversity and globalization. Video with flash menu on the first page displays the main event or promotion this season which has a clear focus. The tear-off menu offers a whole-view of the website.

Cartier http://www.cartier.com/

It was also designed with international view. The flash animations of the product, news, background… gives people strong image about their fancy and classical design. The website indeed promotes their industry appearance.

Apple http://www.apple.com/

Apple is well known as their user interface. They keep their influent Macintosh operating system in their website. In order to introduce their new products (iPhone, AppleTV, ) they divide their website with different category. Following the category as TV (Store), phone (iPhone), multimedia player (iPod+iTune), PC (Mac.), media software (QuickTime), peripheral (Support) and operating system (Mac OS X), people could easily find the way according their needs.

I guess website above will be too ideal to me due to too many technical contents it includes. However, there are some websites of fancy design companies which I think might be workable to me:

Mike Davidson and his partner http://www.dmandp.com/

Beginning with influent flash homepage, they have clear concept of layers and classification of their contents. The structure of the website is explicit which offers me the blueprint of my own webpage.

Mike Industries http://www.mikeindustries.com/

Combining the blog and webpage, they offer clear user interface to access a great amount of contents. The most interesting part for me is the Puget Sound view which will update every two minutes. Users could modify the theme, front and size of the webpage as they like, which is also a cool function. The part of portfolio was designed with dynamic images and sententious introduction.

Culture Design http://www.culturedesign.com/

The consistence of the website is also important. They keep the icons of every page arranged in the same way (with the shape of capital c), and the considerate design on the left column makes people easy to get back to the previous page.

2. Instant Messenger

When we talk about the instant messenger communication software, I think we couldn’t say that IM is a seamless communication tool. Because sometimes it’s hard to get a 100 percent quality communication due to the unstable Internet connection or platform server, on the process of communication. We might lose some information during the message transferring! However, there are some amazing progresses applying in IM, such as we could operate several works at the same time, or even one end is not online. We can also enjoy the long-term or short-term communications which are easily switched in text, graphics, and audio media. Off course, the interaction was increased. IM indeed limits the restrictions of time and space.

Connecting to the standardization, I think IM systems really give us a bad example. There are so many different kinds of systems existing in the public, such as MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, NET Messenger Service, Jabber, ICQ and QQ. The compatibility is still a problem among systems, thus if you want to chat with the same friend in different system, you both have to apply a new user account. Also the connecter list couldn’t be duplicated and transferred between different systems.

Applying with the adoption theory, we could discuss about the amount of users. There are several hundred millions people using IM everyday, and the number is gathering higher every year. IM had already experienced the stage of early adopters and increasing in a rapid speed. Maybe in the future, integrating with mobile communication, the power of IM will be much stronger.

Since we live in the world of division of labor, we shouldn’t expect tools with different function have the same performance. Emails also have its weakness. It’s a single-way communication; you couldn’t expect your receiver stay in front of the computer just in order to reply your email immediately. Or sometime you couldn’t even know if your receiver get you mail successfully or not. Thus, I think IM still have great market place in the future.