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Jamil Wilkins

PTC606

Prof. B. Haggerty

Spring 2013

Website Review

This report serves as a review of the Issuu.com website. The purpose of this review is to identify

what makes up a good web 2.0 site versus a bad web 2.0 site. Issuu.com, or Issuu, is a digital

publishing platform that delivers reading experiences of magazines, catalogs, newspapers,

booklets, and other similar works. This report will address the following criteria used to evaluate

the website: Uniqueness, Audience/User Impact, Interaction, Strengths, and Weaknesses.

UNIQUENESS

What makes Issuu unique, or special, can be identified starting from the home page. The website

acts as an online newsstand that encourages people to use the magazine matrix to engage with

publications and build their own audience. Issuu is designed to give the impression that users are

in their personal Barnes and Noble; to make the online experience as close to the real thing; and

to increase readership through revolutionary functionality (See Figure 1.1).

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Figure 1.1: Issuu.com home page

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AUDIENCE/USER IMPACT

The target audience (individuals, companies, and institutions) isn’t specified until the About

page, but the services and what the audience can do are clearly stated and laid out on the home

page. The audience has the option to read many different publications, publish their own for

others to read, target an audience through distribution, and transform their work into a

professional piece. Not only is the audience impact effectively displayed, but the hierarchy of

user activity is well organized (See Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2: Activity blocks

INTERACTION

Issuu is an interactive website. What makes Issuu interactive is that 1) it falls into two of the six

social media genres of content creation/publishing and content sharing and 2) is supported by the

Social Media definition that Web 2.0 technologies allow users who belong to a community

formed around a service or product to produce content. In this case, the hosted service or product

is publications, in which users are interacting and collaborating with each other as creators of

user-centered content in a virtual community. Another example of what makes Issuu interactive

is that the audience is not limited to the passive viewing of content; but instead they have the

option to contribute and share documents in various forms. Sharing options include e-mail, social

networking, and embedding documents into websites. In addition, users can interact with each

other through comments.

STRENGTHS

Issuu has many highlighting features, but four main areas of strength stand out. They are

Audience, Objectivity, Quality of the Page, and Ease-of-use.

Audience

There should be no question about the purpose of a site. The objective and intended

audience should be clearly defined. The information on the home page tells the viewer

that they are there to discover and share publications. “We love publications” is also a

definitive way of informing the viewer that the website is strictly for publications (See

Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3: Purpose of Issuu.com

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Objectivity

Any biases or assumptions should be noted. The website overall should avoid advocating

particular viewpoints or causes. Despite many of the individual works targeting a specific

audience, the website does a good job at meeting the needs of various interests through a

wide-range of categories (See Figure 1.4).

Figure 1.4: Issuu.com categories

Quality of the Page

The page overall is well organized and easy to navigate.

Different ways to share and discover.

Purpose of the site.

Easy to view and access newsstand.

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Ease-of-use

Contributing to the community is simple and fast. The main options for publishing

documents are shown in the upper right-hand corner of the page. This prevents the user

from having to search for a way to participant, and it is consistent with every page (See

figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5: Main options for user control

WEAKNESSES

Other areas of Issuu are in need of improvement. Examples are listed below.

Accuracy

Information should have reliable sources and be free of grammatical, spelling,

typographical errors to prevent inaccuracies. There’s no clear way to know if each

publication meets this standard.

Currency

An identification of the publications’ timeliness and relevance is not clearly stated. That

information would help give the documents more credibility.

Coverage

Verification that the page and its relative and supporting documents are completed and up

to date is important. The website overall doesn’t give any indication of whether the

publications are complete.

CONCLUSION

Issuu.com is a good 2.0 website. The site is unique, has the potential to impact the audience/user,

is interactive, displays areas of strengths, and has areas in need of improvement. Furthermore,

this review was constructed to cover those five areas of evaluation. Separate reviews can be done

to evaluate the website’s accessibility, usability, intercultural needs, and credibility. An example

of an Issuu publication can be found here:

http://issuu.com/jamilwilkins/docs/wilkins_a1_websitereview.