Website Feedback and UX Testing

 I created a Google Form to find what other people think about my website and check what I need to improve. I embeded this form to navigation bar on my website. My website address was shered in class so everyone could send me feedback.

Most of the reviews about my homepage were very positive. So for now I'll leave it as it is.

Opinions about the navigation bar were good or very good. This showed me that there is not much to improve in this aspect.

Most people liked my About Page, so I decided not to change anything.

As above, my contact page has received very good or good reviews, so everything must work without any issue on it.

My social media links got very good reviews, but one review was bad, so I need to check if everything works as it should.

The mobile view also performed very well. However, there are a few things I don't like and I might have to change them.

Opinions about the portfolio page were mixed. Probably because I haven't uploaded my project yet. People who liked this page must have appreciated the graphic design.

Everyone liked the plan of my project. Unfortunately, I haven't uploaded it yet, but I hope I won't disappoint their expectations.

The comments were mostly positive, but there were a few shortcomings that were brought to my attention. I will definitely check it and try to improve it.

Evaluation of the website

In today's post, I will want to show the final work on my website.

I'll start with the home page. I don't really like the video because it contrasts too much with the background. However, since I don't have a better idea to fill this space, I'll leave it and look for something more suitable on the weekend when I have more time.

After consulting with my tutor, I decided to change the background to a photo I took in the "Tatra" Mountains. I also removed the video and replaced it with a quote from Francis Ford Coppola. 

I will leave the About Me page as it is. In my opinion, it looks good enough not to change anything.

On the contact page, I changed the appearance of the button. I adapted it stylistically to this subpage. First, I changed the shape to an oval and changed the background to a translucent dark one. Later I changed the font size and color to make it more visible.

The portfolio page looks good to me, so I decided not to change anything. It also looks good in the mobile view. Maybe if I notice any mistakes later, I will have to correct them.

Finally, I checked the subpage where I will upload my project. I had to change the background on it. I did this by going to the Site Design tab. I uploaded a photo I found on the internet and used it as a background.

Later I changed the font color in the description to make it more contrasting with the background. This is what this page looks like after the changes.

Because the subtitles blended too much with the background, I brightened the background and changed the font color to black. I also added my project.

Planning stage:

What were your initial ideas for creating a website? style / name / template

I wanted to make my website simple. I know from my own experience that overly complex websites are unreadable and often have technical problems. At the same time, I wanted it to be diverse, so each subpage has a different style. I used my own name because I think it is important for artists to be identified with their works.

Do you have a tagline on your website?

No, I do not have.

Research:

Which designers / artists (relevant to your continuation route) websites did you look for inspiration?

I looked at screenrant and Chris Rogers for inspiration. The screenrant site was refined down to the smallest detail and I would like to carry over the same quality, and Chris Rogers' site showed interesting content. I got some useful things out of both.

How many pages did you want to make on your website and why? Did that change as you progressed onto the research / designing stage?

On my website I would like to have a home page, contact page, about page, and a portfolio with links to my work. Later, I added a feedback page to check reception and find out what I could improve.

Content:

What is the purpose of your website?

I had to create this website as an assignment for Digital Arts. Its main goal is to show my works.

Who are your potential website users?

My potential recipients are people looking for home-made films. Probably more men than women, because my works will be more likely to be related to topics typical of stereotypical men, such as sports, motoring or third world countries.

Why do you think it is important to have a digital portfolio website?

For creators, a portfolio is a showcase. Thanks to the ability to upload their works to the website, the creator can communicate with people from all over the country or even the world. This gives you easy access to potential customers.

Design:

Which design elements / tools did you use? (e.g.: infographics, fixed header, static background image, navigation menu design, text boxes, image galleries, social media feed) and why?

I set a static background on all pages. Each has a different photo as a background. I added social media and coppyright icons in the footer. For now, only blogger and facebook. On the Portfolio page and the subpage with my project, I added linking buttons between the two pages. I added text fields to the Home Page and About Page. On the Professor subpage, I added a wix video in which I posted my work. On the Contact page, I added a contact form with a link to my email so that users can easily contact me. I added a Google form to the Feedback website so that I could conduct a survey and find out people's opinions.

How many pages does your website have and why?

My website has five pages. I included Homepage, About, Contact, Portfolio and Feedback. In my opinion, this is the right number of pages to include everything needed.

Navigation:

Does your website have working social media icon links?

Yes. There were slight problems with that but I fixed it.

Are your pages connected / interlinked?

Yes. The Portfolio page is connected to The Professor subpage using buttons. So you can easily navigate between them.

Is it easy to navigate?

According to the opinions I have collected, navigating my website is easy.

Does the “Contact” page / email link work?

Yes. I checked it and it works fine.

Adding a project to the website

In this post I will describe how I added the project to my website.

First, I had to open the media tab in the Wix website generator, which is located on the left side and I clicked the upload your media button.

Later, the upload media window popped up and I pressed the upload from computer button.

I selected a file from the desktop that was my project and loaded it into the website generator.

Then I had to change the video on my project page. Then I had to change the video on my project page. To do this, I clicked the change video button in the video editor.

Then a window appeared in which I selected change video again.

Finally, I uploaded the previously added video of my project. First, I selected the video I wanted to add and then pressed the Add to Page button.

The last thing I did was to check if everything was working. So I went to the page preview and played the video. Everything worked without any issues.

Creating process: The final result

This is the final version of my project. It took me a long time to create it. I am satisfied with it, but there are many things that could be done better. During creation, I learned many things and gained experience that I hope will pay off in the future. I hope that my next project will be much better.

The Professor

Creating process: Editing

Because describing the process that accompanied me while creating this short video would be very difficult, I decided to record it.

Almost the entire creation process is recorded on these recordings. Unfortunately, I couldn't upload these files to the blog because they were too large, so I had to create an account on YouTube and upload them there so that I could later post links to the blog.

For the reason that I have no experience working with Adobe Premiere Pro, I decided to use Clipchamp for editing, which is much easier to use.

I omitted a few things such as writing the script that I put into the speech generator and only included the creation process because otherwise these videos would take several hours. The process visible in these recordings probably takes almost two hours.  

Creating process: Collecting materials

Today I will describe where I got the materials to create my project.

First, I'll start with music. I downloaded it from https://www.free-stock-music.com. This is a site with free music that can be used for free even in commercial productions.

After entering the website, you can adjust the genre you are looking for in the search engine. I was looking for hip-hop and rap for my project.

After finding the right song, I clicked the free download button and was redirected to another page.

It looks the same on the page you are redirected to. you need to click the free download button and choose where on your computer you want to save the file.

I downloaded the video using the FreeTube application.

First, I had to find the video I wanted to download on YouTube. I found all the materials on the channel Professor Live.

Then I had to copy the link and paste it into the FreeTube app's search engine.

After finding the video in the application, press the download button (down arrow).

Then you save the file to a location of your choice on your computer.

Creating website: Portfolio

The next step towards improving my website is to create a portfolio tab. To do this, I had to select Pages and Menu in the tab on the left. Then I entered the Portfolio subpage.

First, I deleted everything that was on this subpage.

Then I changed the background to black and added the title of the subpage "Portfolio", which was located at the top center of the page. Later I added my photo.

After the change, I added a subpage where I will place my project, called "The Professor".

Then I added thamed buttons on both pages redirecting to each other.

After checking if the links worked, I posted a random video from the Internet on my project's page. When I create my project, I will post it instead of this video.

Finally, I checked whether all the links worked and what the page preview looked like.

Later, I also checked the mobile preview, where I had to change the page layout a bit.

For now, I am not changing the appearance of the project page. I will do this after uploading the project so that I can customize the background.

Ideal User Persona "The Professor Film"

I created this post to introduce my ideal customer for the film "The Professor". Since it is difficult to create accurate research on the ideal customer of my work, I decided to create the ideal recipient of my film. Below I have added a link to the Venngage site where I created his profile and you can watch it . 

Ideal Customer Andrew Anderson 

Further Research: "He got game" by Spike Lee

In today's post, I would like to take a closer look at one of the most famous basketball movies. Namely "He got game" by Spike Lee.

Shelton Jackson Lee known as a "Spike Lee" is an American director and writer born 20 March 1957 in Atlanta. He graduate New York University Film School. "He Got Game" was one of his subsequential movies created in 1998 (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2023).

According to Collins(2018) "He Got Game" is a film about a young, talented basketball player at the beginning of his career who has to make important decisions that his entire environment wants to influence in order to benefit from it.

The film featured many cinema and sports stars. In the main roles we can see Denzel Washington, Rosario Dawson, Milla Jovovich and the then rising NBA star Ray Allen.

In this post I would like to focus on analysis of few shots connected with my project.

The first video shows a duel between the main character and his father. Unfortunately, I managed to find the film in good quality only with Hungarian dubbing. However, this is not too important because my main goal is to focus on game shots. 

This fragment of the film shows a lot of close-ups of actors playing against each other on the court. There are also several shots from above and covering a wider perspective. The editing is quite dynamic. Thanks to the involvement in the main role of professional basketball, all movements and plays look professional. All this is intended to show the most realistic duel possible.

He Got Game-Denzel Washington VS Ray Allen Scene

The second video is higlights from the game.It shows the most interesting actions and plays of the main character and his teammates. "On the technical side, Lee’s enthusiasm for the game and its professional athleticism clearly shows. His style of camerawork and editing is to keep the players in shot when they are making their dunks, slams, or shoots, rather than trick it with quick editing(Brown 2019)." At the end of this video you can see the performance of the high school team. It looks identical to similar materials from real teams, which gives the whole thing a very realistic look.

He Got Game (1998) - We are the Lincoln Railsplitters

The last video shows interviews with professional basketball players and other people related to this sport, such as coaches and journalists. They are mixed with what is happening on the pitch and in the locker room. In the meantime, the reactions of the main character and his father to these statements are shown.A similar solution is used in many documentaries about athletes, such as "The Last Dance". All the techniques used add realism to the entire film. Thanks to this, the viewer has the impression that he or she is watching a documentary and not fiction.

He Got Game (1998) 'Coney Island's Jesus' | Ray Allen | Denzel | Movie Clip

Analyzing the above videos will help me create my own. I'm going to use some shots and editing techniques.I will also use some conventions typical of documentaries included in this film.

References

Brown, D.M. (2019). A Spike Lee Joint: He Got Game [1998]. [online] High On Films. Available at: https://www.highonfilms.com/a-spike-lee-joint-he-got-game-1998/ [Accessed 13 Nov. 2023].

Collins, K.A. (2018). 20 Years After Its Release, Spike Lee’s Basketball Epic He Got Game Remains Searing and Essential. [online] Vanity Fair. Available at: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/05/he-got-game-20th-anniversary [Accessed 13 Nov. 2023].

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica (2019). Spike Lee | Biography, Movies, & Facts. In: Encyclopædia Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Spike-Lee [Accessed 13 Nov. 2023].

Website Research: Christopher Rogers and screenrant

As a part of my assessment I need to made my own website so I made some research. This website research will assist me in understanding how to create my own website so I will consider the overall design, colours, and typography, navigation, usability/user-friendliness, links and mobile view. I chose two sites to reviev: Christopher Rogers and screenrant. 

I will start with the Christopher Rogers website. This site isn't very extencive.

The navigation bar is easy to navigate, but is also realy poor. There is only five subpages (including hompage): christopher rogers, selected work, narrative, photo and about.

Homepage is almost whole black and it is hard to see enything. In some way it look interesting, but there is no content.

Sub-page "selected work" exhibit us works picked by artist. Good quality of videos cowers the flows of site in general. 

In sub-page narrative there are only two videos. Probably favorite works of this artist, which show his style of filmmaking.

Sub-page Photo is showing some of his photos. Despite interesting works, it deserves a negative rating due to the website layout being difficult to navigate.

Page About Me presents a photo of the artist, a short description, email address and links to social media which work perfectly.

Finally, I checked mobile view. Although it looks similar, unfortunately the inscriptions in the navigation panel sometimes blend in with the background or text on the page, which makes it very difficult to use.

My overall rating for this website is rather negative. Despite interesting works, the website has many shortcomings and is underdeveloped.

The second website I am going to describe is screenrant. This is an entertainment website presenting information and news from the world of films, series and games.

You can immediately see the very careful workmanship of the website. The most interesting articles of the day are visible in the foreground.

At the top of the page, just below the name, there are links to subpages with the themes most interesting to users.

Below is a very long list of articles, starting with the most recent. 

In the upper left corner there is a navigation bar icon which, when clicked, will open. There are links to sub-pages such as: MOVIES,TV REALITY, TV GAMING, COMICS, ANIME and MORE. 

They all look very similar in terms of graphics and page setup to the home page, so I see no point in describing each one separately. The only significant difference is the focus on a different genre.

Below are self-advertisements and social media connections that work without any issues.

Mobile view is very similar. Everything works without any glitches, and the website itself is very transparent.

Comparing these two sites, screenrant outclasses its opponent. The website is very well designed in every aspect and there is absolutely nothing to fault. This is not a surprise to me, because a whole team of people are working on screenrant, assigned to specific tasks, and Christopher Rogers' website is a low-budget project managed by one person. Neverless, the screenrant website is of a completely different quality and using it is pure pleasure.