Student Critique
Fah Sathirapongsasuti
BJ Beatty’s uTube
Your main page
In your mission statement in the business plan, you have got some good hooks like “uTube brings streaming entertainment available anytime, anywhere on demand!” and “Whatever is your niche or fancy, uTube has something for you.” You should put these sentences in the main page to let user know about your product.
Content
I afraid that by incorporating video sharing into your project, you might end up competing against some giants like youtube.com or google video. I think these services are doing fairly good jobs, and it is hard to compete with them.
It is not yet clear to me if uTube focuses on shared videos, like youtube, or clips from real TV. In the website, you might want to have two sections for shared videos and TV programs. Each section will have a much different structure, and maintenance will be much different.
In my opinion, your service can be better off being aggregator of many free TV’s and may be some paid programs. You should not complicate your website with all the sharing video service because it will make you a competitor of the existing services and confuse your users.
Thai Example
I have a link to Thai online television service: ObizGo.com. Although you might not understand any of the words in the web, you may try following some links and get a sense how it is run.
I can assure you that this service is extremely popular in Thailand, especially among working people who do not have time to watch things on TV at their show times. The web traffic gets very heavy between 10 pm-2 am, according to the website. Its popularity well reflects the success of online TV aggregator.
About your concern
You said in your writing assignment 1:“People are generally used to getting their video content from a television medium. If most people already have a television, why watch something else?”
As proven successful in Thailand, online television has many advantages over real TV. For instance, if you want to watch a TV show, you have to wait for a specific time, and you have to be there to watch it. If you miss it, you will never get to see it again. To this point, online TV has an absolute advantage because it allows user to watch any program anywhere, anytime.
Also, you can only watch stuff on TV once. But with the online TV, users can come back to watch the program as many times as they want.
With the increasing speed and quality of online video streaming, I am sure that many people are willing to watch TV program on their computer. This happens in Thailand.
Shaker N. Muasher’s Dog & ManTM
Writing for the Web
I think you might notice this yourself after listening to the lecture on “writing for the web.” Yes, you might want to break up the description of your website on the main page into several paragraphs with headings and state your missions upfront.
About the Menus
The term “Nagel’s philosophy” might not make much sense to many people. Though we can be optimistic that this mysterious name will provoke user’s curiosity, I think it is better to make it clear so that your users will not be turned off by it. So, is it possible to use other name such as “What is it like to be a dog?”
You might want to put the topic “Human-Dog interaction/communication” first because it seems more practical and can be interesting to more people. You want to make more useful stuff visible. This can be more appealing to your users.
I haven’t seen much of the instructional text in your menu. Are you planning on putting some instructions on how to take care of dogs? Your setup seems more descriptive than instructional, listing knowledge about dogs but not directly giving suggestions.
As mentioned in your presentation, you might want to make the website easy to navigate. Think about your users. Who are your possible users and how you can guide them to the information they want.
For future development
In the menu “Dog Stories for Dog Lovers,” you can have a forum for “dog lovers” to share their stories and build a community. The forum is good for making your website alive. However, this might come after you get some customers in hand.
Back to Fah's space.
