Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Feb
15
2010
at 3:58pm
With the Winter Olympics underway I’ve been spending a lot of time on Vancouver 2010 website as well as those from some major Canadian media sources. Some have really impressed me with clean, grid-based design, strong features, and good usability. Others, not so much. Let’s take a look.
I will be looking at four major Canadian Olympics sites:
For each site, I will look at the home page, the event schedule, and a sample sport page (Nordic Combined, since I always forget what that is), as well as a few other standout features or things I come across. Read more…
Posted in Design, Great Websites | 3 Comments »
Jan
06
2010
at 9:00am
This website seems to proclaim that in web design, there is no “fold”. Okay, I do get the point. People do scroll and you don’t need to fuss about exactly how much a visitor sees at first glance, or try to cram all your links into that space. However, I do think there are some things you need to consider about what people first see when a page loads. At first glance a user needs to answer a few key questions. As Steve Krug advises in Don’t Make me Think:
- What is this?
- What do they have here?
- What can I do here?
- Why should I be here – and not somewhere else?
The user needs to have some clue as to whether this page or website will give them what they want (have the information they need, the products they want to buy etc.). In that sense, what appears in the fold – whatever size that is for them – is crucially important.
You also need to make sure that it’s evident that there is more content further down to scroll to. I recently visited this page on the Exercise TV site (screenshot). On my screen the fold ends around Jillian’s mid-thigh. With the blue background, the text ending where it does, and the visual focus on the photo, it wasn’t apparent to me that there is more content further down. I actually didn’t realize it until I clicked on the link to browse videos and realized that it pointed further down on the same page. With widescreen monitors the scrollbar may be out of direct view, so conscious design is needed to tell the viewer that they should scroll to see more.
Via For a Beautiful Web, where Stephen Frein has a useful comment.
Posted in Design, Usability | 2 Comments »
Dec
30
2009
at 8:22pm
The Huffington Post has an article on the “Most Innovative Web Site Designs Of All Time” which is kind of a joke. Hello, mystery meat!
There is a reason why most websites have similar basic elements. It’s called usability. When users are trying to accomplish a task (find information, buy something etc.) they don’t need to figure out an entirely new navigation structure and page layout. They need sites to behave in relatively similar ways so they know what to expect and how to accomplish their tasks.
The Web can be a repetitive and boring place. Many Web sites look the same or are created based on the same basic principles.
That’s actually a good thing 
There is a time and a place for trying something new, and that’s valid, it’s just not something that’s appropriate for most websites.
So, the question is, what are the most innovative web designs of all time? I’ll have to give that some thought.
Posted in Design, Usability | No Comments »
May
07
2009
at 3:28pm
I finally got around to reading ALA’s In Defense of Eye Candy article from a few weeks ago. Yes, I’m behind! Anyway, while I somewhat disagree with the author’s use of the term “eye candy”, the bulk of the article is very interesting.
I first read about this in James Kalbach’s Designing Web Navigation (p. 45) just last week. The point is that people have better experiences with visually attractive things, making them easier to use. Emotions are a central part of any user experience:
“When you felel good it is easier to make decisions, brainstorm, and be creative, for instance”
Read more…
Posted in Design | 4 Comments »
Nov
30
2008
at 11:24am
Today I wanted to find and replace colours in a vector graphic. The greens weren’t quite what I wanted, but the image was full of gradients that I didn’t want to have to change by hand. Can any vector program search and replace colours? I wasn’t sure, but instead of searching around for one my husband helped me come up with this SVG solution:
Replace colours in a vector graphic
- Save your graphic as an SVG. You can use Inkscape, Illustrator, or pretty much any other vector program to do this.
- Make note of your “before” and “after” colours as hex values.
- Open the .svg file in a text editor. You’ll see some mark-up that looks much like HTML (that’s because SVG an XML specification).
- Search for your “before” values and replace with the “after”.
- Save.
That’s it! Now, if only Internet Explorer would support SVG so I didn’t have to export these as png’s…
Posted in Design, How-to's | 2 Comments »
Sep
12
2008
at 1:56pm
The “chunky footer” is becoming a big trend in web design. This is a footer that is much bigger than what was traditionally used, often containing several sets of links and other information. Take a look at this flikr set for some examples.
Do you find these to be effective? I think from a design perspective they solve a lot of problems. Get a lot of links on the home page without cluttering the main interface.
The problem I find is that as a user I often miss them entirely. On Jason Santa Maria’s site it took me several visits before I even noticed it was there. Why? Because I didn’t scroll that far (on the actual articles there are often many comments, making the pages quite long. Most users wouldn’t read all those comments.)
What about my home page? Will people notice the Recent Posts block at the bottom? Will they think to scroll past the white? Granted, I was intentional in what I put there vs. what I put on the sidebar. It’s not exactly essential stuff.
Usability experts have found that users have learned to scroll (early usability research found that users wouldn’t scroll past the fold). But, do they scroll the whole page? Prioritizing Web Usability, Jacob Nielsen points out that users often won’t scroll further if they get the visual impression that there is no more content on the page. If users assume that the navigation ends with the top or left navigation bar, will they try looking further down for more links?
What do you think?
Posted in Design, Usability | 2 Comments »
