Tutorial Section

[Ed_L]

It just occured to me that a newbie might miss quite a lot that we have to offer. When you go to the tutorial home page, there is a list of categories to be seen on the left side of the page. On the right side of the page, categories are listed, with tutorial links (usually five) below each category. It seems to me that many people will look at the tutorial links, and assume that's all there is. Maybe it would be a good idea to make a note near the links that there are more to be seen if you click on the category on the left side of the page?

Ed

[Doug Nelson]

It does say "Newest by Category". To me that implies there are older ones. You think they need more hand-holding than that?

[Ed_L]

I dunno. Maybe one of our newer members can let us know if they think it would be advantageous. It just seemed to me they might miss it.

Ed

[roger_ele]

I agree with Ed for these reasons

-Graphicaly, the newest by category is small and although Tab like almost looks at a glance like it belongs to the graphical elements above the Tab instead of below. In terms of gouping by color/tone association. Someone new is going to be excited to look at the tutorials, the graphics there are so strong with the white against black that you have to stop and 'read' the rest of the page instead of it being intuitive.

Possible solutions;

-Make Newest by category larger and put a line or color between it and above so it is more grouped with what is below it.

-Put '(newest)' after each section category heading.

-Put 'all tutorials' up with categories on the left to diferentiate from the newest section.

Roger

[Ed_L]

Excellent solutions Roger. Thanks.

Ed

[roger_ele]

Or what I really expected at first glance, That the heading under the newest tab would take me to all of them. Just the newest were listed under the heading ... then I looked around and realized that they were listed twice and figured it out.

[Ed_L]

I guess that's what I expected too. But being on the site as long as I have, I knew there were many others. That's what made me think a newbie might miss them.

Ed

[lodhurr]

I just joined recently. At first I thought that was all of the tutorials. I tend to skip reading what is unnecessary to get to what I want on a page, which in this case is the tutorials. Then I noticed little arrow looking things next to the section headings. I thought they should be clickable to take me to more tutorials, if there were more. Since they weren't clickable, I assumed my initial assessment was correct. But then somewhere along the way, I did a search and noticed that tutorials not listed were coming up. Sooo.... Why isn't that arrow button looking thing clickable? Why aren't those section headings themselves clickable?

This reminds me... if there's one thing I'm going to remember from the human-computer interaction class that I'm taking, it's: whenever users are having trouble with a design, it's the designer's fault.

[Vikki]

I confess, I didn't realize there were more tutorials either.
Two reasons why I think that happened:

The little arrows do nothing...so I thought there were no more in the category (don't arrows within web pages usually indicate "more" or "next"?)

I didn't really notice the words "Newest by category". I would expect an important header like that to be more prominent, (perhaps even color highlighted). The words " Click on the categories on the left for a FULL listing of all tutorials" might have been helpful as well.

I guess you could say we all need some "hand holding", but my thoughts are that if we all aren't getting it (we're intelligent and web savy, aren't we?) a lot more people aren't either, and therefore the page design isn't achieving it's goal.