Assignment 7: Flow Chart



Flow Chart for Amazon.com

 So for this assignment, the class was told to create a flow chart of how to order a book from amazon.com. To start this assignment, I actually went on amzaon.com and wrote down the steps I took as I pretend to buy a book from the website. The first steps I took were asking the viewer if they knew any information about the book they are looking for and if so to enter it into the search bar as this would be the quickest way to find the book. If they did not know any information, I thought the next logical step would be to either browse through the book selections or to find more information about the book the viewer needed and to return. After the initial searching for the book, the next step was to select the book from the options of books presented. From this point on with the checkout process, amazon.com would ask the customer simple questions such as asking if the customer wants more books, asking for billing/ shipping information, and asking if the book is a gift. While this appears to be extra steps for the checkout process, it seems as though amazon.com is trying to get the customer to buy more items by advertising them to the customer. When making the flow chart, I tried to keep these steps as processes rather than decisions because I felt that when even someone who has never been to the website would simply proceed through these rather than treat each step as a decision. For example if some one’s shipping information is different than their billing information, amazon.com ask the customer this question and allows the customer to fill out the different information but for the flow chart, I simply kept this under one process since filling out the separate information never takes one to another page. After these steps I terminated the flow chart with logging the viewer off and having them wait for the book. In an earlier sketch I had more processes and decisions in the flow chart, but I choose to omit these, as they seemed to use more ink and not really have much of an impact on the flow chart. Also after looking at the flow chart examples in class, I tried to add some humor elements into the flow chart even if they added extra or unnecessary steps because I felt it added elements that makes the viewers experience through the flow chart better. I also attempted to maintain the proper format for the final flow chart by making sure that I had the proper symbols, arrows, and non-overlapping lines in order to prevent any confusion.

I found this assignment to be both easy at times and hard at times. The easy parts where, well simply writing down the steps of simply buying a book from amazon.com. The more difficult parts of the assignment were figuring what to make a process and what to leave as a decision. I felt this way because I tried to keep the steps required to a minimum however I needed to make sure that all options were accounted for.