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TEACHING
WEB DESIGN AND GRAPHIC APPLICATIONS FOR E-COMMERCE
Sunghyun Ryoo Kang
Assistant Professor
College of Design, Iowa State University
E-commerce websites provide products or services electronically to users. Providing useful and valuable information to users is the key element of a successful E-commerce. An E-commerce website designer must understand the new technology involved, design elements and principles, and most importantly, users and their reasons for using E-commerce. According to Jacob Nielsen, "improving usability by 50% often increases sales by 400%." The usability and communication of E-commerce websites can be significantly improved by applying traditional graphic design principles. The course that I am going to discuss in my presentation is designed to help students at Iowa State University where I teach, develop advanced and experimental website design applications to E-commerce. The goal of this course is for students to understand E-commerce and to learn how graphic design can improve a website's usability. This presentation will introduce the course syllabus, assignments, projects, and include examples of students' work. This 2 credit, 16-week semester long course, is open to upper level undergraduate graphic design students. It is also open to graduate students who have a basic knowledge of HTML. The course is based on lectures, research, small group discussion, and projects. Students are expected to complete two major projects and two assignments. Graduate students are required to conduct one additional research project. Through the two assignments, students show that they understand the concept of usability as it applies to the Internet and its usage as a medium for E-commerce. Through the two projects, using their graphic design knowledge, students learn how layout on the web differs from traditional print media, how to plan and develop an E-commerce website design, organize the information, and build a user-centered interface. Understanding E-commerce and attendant new technologies involved is a major challenge to graphic designers. This course will help students to enter their career in web-related design.