Critique of Web Essays

While looking at the four websites that interrogated an interface, I learned many things that I did and did not want to do for my own creation. Below, you can see what I’ve decided:

Yay

On my interrogation, I want to include navigation tools to help my audience read through my essay easily. I want to include hyperlinks so that there are multiple ways to figure out what I’m talking about and to provide extra assistance. I also really want to include my own experience with Masher on the page so the audience can see what I did with it and refer to it as they’re trying to figure out the application as well. It’s also important to include some contrast so the essay isn’t completely boring and deters my audience from reading my essay. I can do so through the use of color, headings & subheadings, bullet points and images.

Nay

I really don’t want to write huge blocks of text because it’s not easy to read. I also want to avoid overusing pages and images so that the whole document becomes confusing and distracting.

Auto-correct Fail

I’ve encountered many auto-correct problems since 2006 when I had T-9 text to the auto-correct of Blackberry and the iPhone 5 & 6. While it makes texting easier, auto-correct can have some downfalls.

For example, now that smartphones are very prominent in society today, many people are using auto-correct and auto-complete based on the app they’re using at the time. When I’m texting, it can be infuriating to have to type something six times in order for my phone to understand that the auto-correct way isn’t the way I want to type. Auto-complete can also have its complications when I’m ordering food or clothes online and it auto-fills my information that is no longer correct so then I have to go back and fix it all. But then it catches on and fills in the incorrect information again if I press the enter button.

I see this problem in texting all of the time. My boyfriend and I send multiple texts back-to-back because we don’t take the time to complete our thoughts in just one text message. So he could be sending me up to eight messages at a time because he’s trying to fix a word but auto-correct keeps changing it to the wrong word by the time he presses send again and thinks he has it right. (I do this a lot, too).

The problem is, we still use our auto-correct because it’s better than having a bunch of mistakes that you made on your own. If we’re being honest, we would rather blame a technology than ourselves. Really think about it: the reason we keep auto-correct is because it’s easier and there are less problems to fix than if we just typed on our own. It could be because our thumbs are too big for the keyboard or we type too quickly and miss the right letters or we’re simply too lazy to write it all out.

So I guess I’ll settle for the constraints that come with auto-correct because it’s a pretty convenient tool that I definitely would love to keep around than get rid of.