thirtyonethree

I found this site through Design Meltdown, a gallery of design styles. This site is a good example of nice design which gets recognized by a gallery but has some usability issues when you actually use it.

First, You have to go to the top right to a “home” graphic to link back to the home from a secondary page. It took me several seconds to figure out how to get back to the homepage when I got deeper in the site. I would suggest making the site branding into a link back to the homepage which is a common practice.

Second, the polaroid photos in the Flash animation eventually cover up the last parts of the sentences in the welcome message. Not a good practice to cover up text that is conveying a message. A small but important detail to make sure one page element does not overlap another and make it unreadable.

This site serves as a reminder to me that elegant design needs to also be usable and think about the experience of the user. Sites “behave,” they are not just an artistic canvas. I want to be able to create sites that are elegant and provide a good user experience.

Given all that, I do like the visual design of this site. The monochromatic is nice and gives character to what the Web site is promoting so I think it does a good job of visual communication. The photos look even more vibrant because they introduce other colors into this brown palette. I also like the “realness” feel of the site and real world objects such as the photos, tape, paper, and passport.

I have been attending the UI12 Conference in Boston this week. I have been looking forward to this since last May when I signed up. I had attended the conference 2 years ago and it was really good.

I wish I had more time to process all that is being thrown at me. I would like to make a list of action points before I leave tomorrow so that I can begin to integrate this experience into my work.

Some of the highlights of the week:

• Getting to hang out with Andy Budd, one of my Web design superheroes. I met Andy last year at Refresh06. I have had several opportunities to chat with Andy during the conference.
• Communicating with Visual Design workshop taught by Luke Wroblewski. I also got a lot out of a seminar he did on Form Design. I look forward to his book on the subject which comes out in March. One of my action points is to read his other book, Site Seeing, which covers the material he went over in the workshop.
• Eating lunch with Cameron Moll. Yesterday, I got to eat lunch with Cameron Moll. I enjoyed getting to know him on a personal level. I took his workshop on Designing Elegant Interfaces with CSS. I wished we had covered a little more on design but he included things in the notes that were interesting including the process of his design of his portfolio.

I am looking forward to hearing more from Jared Spool this afternoon. Got to go.

I came across Baldwin Wallace’s Web site as I was thumbing through Step Into Design magazine at Barnes and Noble. This is another example of a trend I have seen in college Web sites.

This site is drawing you into the world of being a student at Baldwin Wallace. Jared Spool classifies this kind of content as Inukshuk content (see previous post to find out more about Inukshuk content).

One thing that got my attention is that it looks like once you are a student at this college, you are able to create an “action plan” online that your professors access and make recommendations based on what is in that action plan. I think this site uses Flash well to create a good user experience as you meet 4 different students and hear their stories.

I just received a new business credit card. As with all credit cards, you have to activate it by calling a phone number. I called the number, pressed 2 for English and then entered my card number. Then I was asked for a verification code.

What? I look through the letter that came with my card. There is nothing that says “verification code.” The instructions tell me if I do not have the code to enter my business phone number. I try that and told I am not in the system.

My colleague had just finished talking to a person so I ask him how he got to that point. He said that he just did not enter anything when asked for verification code. I decided to press “0” and I talk to a person. So after three phone calls, I finally activate my card. It would have been a whole lot nicer if I had been given better instructions on the front end and the telephone menu had told me that I could press “0.” I have learned that through experience but it still would be helpful. The phone system did not have an “escape” clearly noted (I’m learning about that in a book on interaction design).

Just another reminder of how important experience design is.

I came across the Sundance Film Festival site from Cameron Moll’s Premium Linkage. I liked the design of the site. There are several elements that I found interesting:

• Right navigation on the secondary pages
• Overhanging graphic on that navigation bar that indicated “you are here”
• Colored drop down boxes of links on the horizontal navigation bar. The designer uses the same color for a “stripe” that goes down the left side of the page and for the background of the secondary page right navigation
• Use of sIFR for page titles
• Color palette and “feel” of the site