Week 4 Part 2: What makes a website effective? What makes good design?

This week I'm reviewing two of the most well-known and widely used learning management systems, Canvas and Blackboard.  

Canvas and Blackboard are effective because they both do a reasonable job at organizing a lot of information, while providing interactive forums for discussion, project review, and live chats.  The sites have very similar designs: clean layouts with prominent, upper left-hand navigation menus.  Canvas uses a more inviting and fresher color scheme, which is superior to blackboard's more drab color schemes.  Design-wise, Canvas is slightly more minimalist at the onset, allowing the user t navigate to further details.  

While I imagine both Canvas and Blackboard are both trying to create well-designed and user-friendly sites, students keep coming back to the sites because they have to.  Personally, I have some classes that use Canvas and some that use Blackboard.  While I come back to both sites out of necessity, I actually appreciate using Blackboard slightly more, probably because I have used the site before.  Both sites could improve by integrating a navigation bar that follows scrolling.  Oftentimes, I will be at the bottom of the page and the navigation bar is still at the top of the page.  Additionally, Canvas has poor options for embedding a file in a discussion board; the user must navigate to his profile homepage, update the file, then navigate back to his discussion page. 


BLOG COMMENTS:

This week I reviewed the blogs of :

Stacy Brock  

Alexa Kent

Sujatha Nanduri

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