Archive for category Reviews
R/GA Has Stage Presence in Corporate Website’s Design
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews on June 3rd, 2010
R/GA's main corporate website has a radical design in information architecture terms, which it hides in plain sight.
Dave Malouf coined a prescient phrase in the title of a recent blog post regarding the design of websites. It’s not really a page anymore, but more of a stage. “Like the real stage itself,” he wrote, “we can create sub-stages where sub-dominant contexts have great significance and focus if only but for a short while, while contextually relevant to the whole.” This is a tidy way of characterizing the very essence of the RIA movement, and an excellent conceptual framework for understanding the information architecture of the post-page web. Web designers have traditionally constructed virtual buildings, not narratives, out of information – with pages as their rooms and sitemaps and breadcrumbs as their planning tools and system of wayfinders. But this is changing fast and stagecraft is soon to become a key skill of all employed web IAs.
How to Name Your Website and Write A Tagline like a Pro
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews, UX-Driven Company on May 24th, 2010
I am a reluctant brander. Like most User Experience designers, I like to think of myself as a high-minded design thinker – not a marketer. You know the arguments. Designers think about solving real human problems and obsess on the essence of something’s purpose. Marketers define essence as that which gets noticed and remembered. Designers are empathically creative. Marketers are exploitatively creative. Designers seek timeless truths. Marketers are trend-chasers. Designers live in Brooklyn and sell artisanal pickles between freelance gigs. Marketers live in Manhattan and coin phrases like FroYo. Yet it didn’t take me long working in this field to realize that making such distinctions is wrong-headed. If anything, I relate more to the marketer these days. Marketers trend towards the pragmatic. Designers? At their worst: ideologues, aesthetes, navel-gazers. Design and marketing ultimately chase the same goal, “marketplace magic,” so why not think like a good branding brain in order to name and position your digital business? At a minimum you should know a little about the work of Lynn Altman before you set about trying to name your site and write a tagline for it. Her firm, BrandNow, and her book, Brand it Yourself, are excellent starting points for demystifying the creative process behind successful product branding.
Eight Homepage Designs That Would Work as Billboards
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on May 9th, 2010
Think of a homepage as something a user takes in at 65mph. (photo credit: Andrew Canion)
Increasingly users think of the homepage as that place where the search box lives. Web analytics data bears this out. A typical homepage, particularly if there is a large and diverse set of products or information on a site, will see a vast majority of it’s clicks consolidated around the global navigation and search box. If you think of a user flying by your homepage at 65 mph on their way to the search box, then how much information are they likely to take in? How can you make a statement about the value of your site that a user can tune in out of the corner of their eye? The best homepages confront this behavioral reality and offer the same concise, impactful designs as those on highway billboards. Read the rest of this entry »
Interaction Design & Sustainability Case Study: Ford SmartGuage with EcoGuide
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on December 4th, 2009
The dashboard that monitors what the driver is doing, not the machine.
Ok, so I admit that I have a tendency to overvalue the impact of my own profession. I believe Malcom McCullough when he says that interaction design is likely to be one of the great liberal arts of the 21st century. The great American novel, when it finally arrives, will be planned in Omnigraffle. And the fact that most of us deploy our tradecraft in the service of streamlining the movie rental process, selling sunglasses or laminate flooring, facilitating the sharing of snapshots and how-to articles on pumpkin carving does not diminish our greatness. In fact, in my world, interaction designers are likely to be key players in all forms of meaningful societal change from here on in. (Just try and tell me that Obama’s website wasn’t pivotal in his election!) But what role does I.D. have in making the planet greener? Even I struggled with that one.
10 Great Interaction Designs – in Cut & Folded Paper
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on September 30th, 2009
Experience designers who work in digital media such as RIAs, video games, and DVD menus are already well conditioned to thinking beyond the page as a metaphor for organizing information structures. But paper itself is not the villain. In fact, paper can be transformed into all sorts of interesting interactive possibilities – including graceful and surprising transitions, progressive disclosure of information, impactful visuals, and above all, a compelling and satisfying simplicity.
Wired Misses the Point in Craigslist Cover Story
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on August 21st, 2009
The September, 2009 Issue of Wired
For several years now, I’ve been showing a screen capture of the craigslist.org home page to audiences at various presentations on usability. I ask a simple question. Is this website usable? The audience members, who are generally students, programmers and business people and not members of the design community, invariably return a resounding yes in response to my question. It’s taken for granted. Craigslist, in all it’s glorious straightforwardness, defines usable. Then I proceed to show them how the design breaks a lot of rules – at least by the conventional wisdom of modern web UI designers. For instance, the craigslist home page is crammed full and almost completely lacks any sense of visual heirarchy or prioritization. It provides little to no opportunity for serendipitous discovery of content, only myriad starting options for those who already know what they are looking for. It’s chock-full of cryptic abbreviations. It’s un-visual. It squanders precious screen real-estate on seldom used features. For instance, a full third of the screen is devoted to displaying all the cities where the various Craigslists are located – something which the average user rarely, if ever, has the need to change. Let’s face it, this site is a usability train wreck, right?
Zooming in on Prezi: A Review
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews on July 21st, 2009
The Prezi Menu
PowerPoint slide shows are like commercial jet aircraft– ubiquitous in business life, but with technology that hasn’t seemed to budge in decades. As a communication medium, PowerPoint is one of the great corrupting influences for those of us who trade in the office arts. It’s the junky sit-com of authoring environments, with it’s crammed toolbars full of lazy visualizations and transitions, text distorters, prix fixe layouts and color schemes, royalty free clip-art hokum and assorted other information-free nonsense. Its worst trait of all is more fundamental – that it constrains our ideas to the slide as the uniformly sized chunk of information. Once we commit to dealing in slides, we take an immediate hit on our mental agility and the level of focus we bring to the simple act of conveying our ideas.
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