Hannah, Caty, Caitlin, and I got together Thursday morning to discuss our thoughts on the websites we viewed the days before. With our project with the Central Rappahannock Heritage Center in mind, here are some of our thoughts:
What We Liked
We LOVED the interactive features and easy to follow navigation of the Digital Scholarship Lab website. This site have maps ranging from elections, immigration, forced enslaved migration, and transportation across the United States and multiple time periods. We love the interactive features like being able to move across the timeline or click on different states or counties to get more information about the time and place. Incorporating some level of interactive engagement is something we want to prioritize in our project because one it’s just more fun that way and two it creates much more of a meaningful experience for our audience.
We also really liked the search and tagging features, such as the one on Emilie Davis Diaries. On the bottom of each page there is a feature where you can look up diary entries by keywords, like Frederick Douglass or Gettysburg Address, which we thought was a really cool way of being able to search for things in their digital collection. Incorporating a feature like this on our project would be a great way to encourage more engagement from users, which we know is an important feature for the members of the CRHC.
What We Want to Avoid
Together we explored the site for Gilded Age Plains City and while we liked some of the features like their interactive map, we agreed that it’s a bit hard to get there since the organization with the multiple menus on the home page make it a bit confusing for users to get an understanding for what’s actually on the site. For our project, we want to make sure that everything is streamlined so users don’t have to go clicking around to figure out how to get back to certain pages. We also were not big fans of the color choices. Aesthetics, we agreed, are very important to us for when we go to create our own project because we want users to just take a glance at their screen and want to know more and go exploring.
What We Want to Incorporate
In addition to wanting to prioritize aesthetics, creating interactive features, and having simple navigation and searching tools, we want to incorporate a way for users to comment and share their thoughts or any additional information they may have on the resources and documents included in our project. We know from talking with the CRHC that they have some documents, such as photos, that they haven’t been able to identify. Incorporating a comment feature, like the one in the Emilie Davis Diaries, would be a way we can do this that’s simple and easy to use for both the CRHC and the public audience.
Overall, we are leaving today with excitement and great inspiration for our project, and we can’t wait to get started!
Looks like you and the group made great progress on Thursday!