As iTunes is such a well known product already and so popular from the get go I once again struggled to really distance myself from the current site and be as creative as perhaps I could.
My main idea for the website was to try and reduce as much navigation as possible as it seems to dominate the iTunes store at present and to also reduce the amount of visual noise which can distort and confuse the user.
It soon became apparent that reducing the amount of navigation on the iTunes store was a very difficult task and so my final product still contains quite a lot of navigation but hopefully not enough to confuse users.
Unlike the current iTunes store I tried to keep the navigation all together. Currently on the iTunes store navigation appears to be all over the place which once again is very confusing for users. I also had the navigation in the center of the site it hopefully also allows user to see all the navigation at once rather than having to scroll up and down a lot to find what they are looking for. I find that when navigation is clearly viewable all at once it allows me to scan it quicker and so I tried to bring this across onto my redesign.
I have also managed to severely limit the amount of visual noise on the website however by only showing a couple of images at the most on each page. This did include limiting the amount of flash I included on my website as I feel this can confuse the user quite often too.
Including flash on my website I think was not necessary but was a definite plus to learn as I can now say I have very basic Flash experience and is something I can improve on in my spare time also.
By using flash banners and animated gif's on my site it also allowed me to save space so that the user doesn't have to scroll as much to see important bits of information but at the same time keeps predominant ad's immediately viewable.
Looking back at my website I am now not sure if the idea to change background colours on my separate genre pages was a good idea. Although the genre's I chose had quite obvious colour schemes attatched to them not all do (such as TV and Movie soundtracks) I also think that it removes the consistency from my website which may confuse the user just as much as large amounts of navigation and lots of images.
Were I to do the assignment again then the first thing I would do is try and strip my mind of existing ideas about the iTunes store and try to create something new as apposed to thinking of what was currently on the site and how to rearrange it rather than redesign it.
I would also try and do more user testing and gain more feedback in the design process, especially towards the end as most of my feedback came from initial designs. I think that by doing some sort of user testing, even at the paper stage, would have told me if the amount of navigation I have was the right amount, or too much.
Finally I would also change the sub-genre pages as previously mentioned and make them more consistent. This would perhaps be done by keeping the same colour scheme throughout my website and adding in a few more images which were relevant to the genre. I would also perhaps change the font of the genre names to something more fitting with the theme, though again this could bring up design issues for certain genres which don't have a fitting font.
