One important rule we try to follow @ Pemaquid is to always have 3-4 Sharpies and tall stacks of blank paper when meeting w/a Client to review design comps.
It’s the easiest way to sketch out your design thoughts visually. It’s faster than using a whiteboard, and it’s much easier to sketch out ajax or design interactions with Clients - especially those who aren’t particularly Web-savvy - than it is to try to explain it to them verbally.
Pemaquid Communications has scored three nominations for techMaine’s annual Best of the Web Awards. Pemaquid tied for the most nominations of any Maine Web design studio. The nominees are…
The site features exquisite stationery for any occasion, along with fine art prints, calendars and something racy called Go-Go Wrap! The company manages over 200 product listings in more than a dozen categories, along with order tracking and fulfillment, through a custom version of Pemaquid’s Commerce Manager.
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This site draws out the visually appealing nature of this part of the Maine Coast. For many Internet searchers, the site is a tourist gateway to the region and it was very important to the Chamber that the site, through its look and feel, compare favorably to similar sites for more well-known Downeast destinations.
More about MidcoastMaine.com »
The Big Easy is Portland, Maine’s premier night spot. The club wanted a new Web site that rocks as loud as they do. The Content Manager allows easy-self-publishing of upcoming events as well as multiple Photo Galleries of local bands in action on its stage. The design really makes you want to be there!
Best of the Web award winners will be announced at techMaine’s Gala, taking place May 20th @ the Eastland Park Hotel Ballroom.
Actually, it’s would be more than a little unfair to get all the credit for the Big Easy site. The absolutely amazing graphic design is the work of Walt Craven. Walt’s also the lead singer/guitarist in Lost on Liftoff, a local band that often plays at The Big Easy. Walt has done graphic design work for the club for some time.
Jennifer Ecker, Pemaquid Web Designer extraordinaire, rocked out the world-class HTML and CSS in her spare time (of which she has very little).
A simply stunning work of art!
Yours truly set up the Web hosting, plugged in the Pemaquid Content Manager, gave a little architectural guidance to Walt & Jen and showed club co-owner Ken Bell how to use said Content Manager to self-publish updates to the Calendar and Gallery.
Wordpress 2.5 was released about a week ago. It sports an administrative interface that was redesigned by Happy Cog. I’ve kicked the tires on it and it’s a lean, clean machine. You may want to upgrade.
I surfed over to a certain Maine Web site the other day and found that it had been redesigned. Here is the site navigational structure:
Can anyone tell me with 100% certainty what those items represent?
Therein lies the problem. You can’t tell what you’re going to get when you click (you can’t even tell that you can click). The only hint that this is the site navigation is that it is positioned in the spot where, if you’ve surfed for any length of time, you know that navigation is usually found.
Here’s the site, btw, if you’d now like to see that nav positioned within the overall layout.
(I don’t mean to pick on Downeast. They’re a great company and their Web site is far better than the previous version. I’m just using their site to show how you can improve the user experience on sites you design.)
Navigation is best as text. Text that is unambiguous. “About” is more effective than “Who We Are“.
Lo and behold, when you mouseover the nav on this site in question, you see a… word.
There are two big reasons why you should use text in you site navigation.
Usability. There’s an excellent book on Web design by Steve Krug called Don’t Make Me Think. In it, Krug points out usability studies show that people usually don’t read Web sites - until they’ve found that article they were searching for - they scan them. Navigational text that is simple and clear supports this scanning activity. With graphics, you have to stop and think (”hmmm… what could a camera mean?…”) This is why icons, unless they are universally understood, are also poor choices for navigational labels on Web sites.
Accessibility. In the example above, if you were visually impaired and came upon this site, there would be no way for you to understand that the images represented the site navigation. It would be much better to place navigational items towards the top of your HTML as a list of text links and to then use CSS to style the list to match your overall design concept.
Web site designs like the one in question point to a larger issue in Web design, which I call The Tyranny of Graphic Design. That’s a topic for another day, but briefly, Web design is not graphic design. It’s interaction design (of which graphic design is certainly a part). In creating Web sites, designers should take care that the graphical design concepts they produce make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on a site, not harder.
Don’t make me think…
It’s that time of year again, when people take a look back at what they’ve done and take a look ahead. Some, including Yours Truly, still even make New Year’s Resolutions.
Seth Godin has a great post on his blog today that fits right in with that theme. He says people should think about what they’re doing right now and ask themselves if they will be proud of themselves 15 years hence. Do we think these are crazy days? Godin says that’s nothing new:
So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.
If times are going to be crazy no matter how you slice it, says Godin, Why Not Be Great?
Sounds like a good Resolution to me.
Leo Burnett, the great ad man, had the same idea, which he put this way:
When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get them, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.
And Donald Trump said:
As long as you’re going to think anyway, think big.
To paraphrase The Donald, if you, like me, are going to build Web sites anyway, think big. Stretch a little bit this year:
Here’s wishing you a happy, productive - and Great! - New Year!
Pemaquid’s adventures on Facebook are the subject of a story in today’s Portland Press Herald (Just my luck, I got a haircut the day after they took the photo, and no, you won’t see it here).
Thanks to my Facebook buddies Wendy Clark (Portland Diner logo) and Jennifer Ecker (Web design) for their help in creating Pemaquid’s Facebook apps. Thanks also to Facebook friend Justin Ellis (PPH reporter who wrote the story), who gave us a very “honorable mention”.
Our apps mentioned in the story:
More are on the way. Stay tuned…
From today’s Dilbert:
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Au contraire, mon ami! Usability is the most important piece of your Web strategy. Without it, the money spent on design, programming and especially search engine optimization will be wasted.
I’d like to thank Shirley Helfrich, Thomas Bennett and the folks at the Prince Memorial Library and everyone at the Southern Maine Library District for inviting me to speak the other day about Web site usability at their annual conference. Thanks for the opportunity, the thoughtful questions - and for not throwing tomatoes!
Here are some of the tips I mentioned (and some I did not), as well as some links to resources you might find useful.
Walt Mossberg reviews Leopard, the latest version of Apple’s OS X, in today’s Wall Street Journal. he says it’s easier to use than Microsoft’s Vista. His review illustrates once again that in the digital world, designing for usability will lead to success in the long run. As many as 20% of non-corporate computer sales go to Apple now, up from low single digits recently.
Why? Here’s what Mossberg says of OS X:
…It has proved to be as powerful and versatile for mainstream consumers as Windows, yet easier to use(emphasis mine) and more secure…
It works the same way for Web sites. In the long run, if your site is easier to use than a competitor’s - think Facebook (easy) vs. MySpace (cluttered and clunky) - you’ll win in the long run, even if your competitor has the #1 spot on Google.
If you’re a Web designer, 2007 is the year that Internet Explorer 6 became “the new Netscape 4″. Actually, no, things could never be that bad again, but when you’re designing Web sites using CSS and Web standards, IE6 is the one that now throws up the most humdingers.
A question I often hear from other designers is why, with IE7 and Firefox offering better support for Web standards, aren’t more people upgrading from IE6? (The latest browser statistics show IE6 use falling from about 42% to 36% during the past 8 months.)
The reason has to do with usability and cost-benefit analysis.
While most Web designers wouldn’t dream of using IE6 as their primary browser these days, especially with add-ons like the Web developer toolbar and Firebug available for Firefox, it works just fine for what most people want to do online. Checking email, reading up on sports scores and stock prices, buying shirts from LL Bean and using social network sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook and MySpace all can be done just fine w/IE6. There’s no compelling reason to switch.
Kevin Hale of Particle Tree has written an interesting article on the subject.
The upshot for Web designers? Remember to focus on usability when working with Clients to design features for an interactive Web site. Think about how customers, employees and other groups will do on your site before investing a lot of development time in creating a cool Web site feature that won’t get used all that much.
And it looks like IE6 will be with us for some time to come.
I saw a real “whopper” the other day (pun intended). I called up a Web page, and after a momentary lag as a Flash file loaded, a giant bass jumped onto my screen.
Boy, talk about a “splash page”.
An audio soundtrack of a babbling brook lingered in the background as I browsed the page.
I guess to some Web designer, somewhere, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
The owner of the Web site, however, was not amused. The fish had leaped into his eyeballs dozens of times and what started out as a nifty little dash of motion and sound had turned into an annoying intrusion onto the user experience.
Remember the last time you heard a good joke? It was a real belly-shaker when you first heard it, right? Now imagine hearing the same joke, at the same time, every day for an entire month. On the 31st telling, would it still be as fun to hear as it was the first time?
When designing a Web site, creativity is always a good thing, but designers need to make sure that the visual design and the interactivity don’t get in the way of what the site visitor is looking to do. Otherwise, no one will come to swim in your pond.
Web designers are often tempted to try the latest flashy technique. After all, that’s what makes Web design fun. Before you upload that snazzy whizbang, however, think of the impact your flying fish will have on potential visitors… potential customers… and especially your brand.
And as for the proud owner of the Web site w/t/giant jumping bass? He’ll be throwing that one back.
There’s an interesting article in today’s Wall Street Journal on Apple CEO Steve Job’s drive to minimize buttons. As most people in the known universe understand by now, Apple’s new iPhone lacks buttons found on other cell phones and, well, almost every other handheld device.
It’s part of Job’s overall design aesthetic - which you could sum up as Less is More.
I was reminded of Less is More a few days ago when a friend sent me a link to a new online ad campaign being run by Volvo. Shortly thereafter, I bumped into the ad campaign’s message again as part of a larger post on the topic on 37 Signals’ blog.
Less is More is certainly a good mantra for Web interface designers. Avoid “Nascar Syndrome” (the tendency to load up an interface w/links and features regardless of how often they’ll be used - hmm, there’s another post in there somewhere…) and focus on a simple, clean design that’s easy to understand.
For those of you who still may be wondering if, instead, More really is More, I submit this for your consideration:
As everyone in North America knows, today’s the day Apple launches its new smart phone, the iPhone. Apparently no one is working today b/c they’re all standing in line to get one.
What can the iPhone do? Play clip below.
Hello… Houston… we have a tech bubble. TechCrunch reports that one of the latest startups to gain funding is MizPee, a site for your mobile devices that lets you know where the nearest loo is located.
Consensus on the new site is “Huh?!?” (Read the comments). It seems most people just look for a Mickey D’s or an Irving station when they’ve got to go, instead of whipping out that cellphone and scrolling through search results.
Which brings us back to Web site usability, interestingly. Moral: think about whether people will use that Web interface before you sink millions into a Web site (oh, wait - it’s not their money they’re spending, it’s venture capital - forgot)
Looks like the whole Web 2.0 thing is bottoming out (remember companies that wanted you to buy pet food online and had sock puppet mascots?) The canary’s coughing. Deja vu, baby.
Did you know: People are already selling iPhones on eBay, even though Apple’s highly-anticipated cellphone doesn’t officially hit the market until June 29th?
Think about it: when’s the last time you saw a cell phone ad that featured the user interface? Well, that’s just what Apple does in three new spots out in advance of the release of its anxiously-awaited iPhone.
I have one guess as to why Apple decided to show off the phone - at a base price of $499, the company had to show people why it’s worth shelling out the extra moola (they sold me). Second guess: the user interface is so different from other cellphones that the ads serve as a brief tutorial on how to get the most out of the device.
There’s a lot of news this morning about a new computing device from Microsoft called the Surface.
It’ll be rolled out first in hotels and perhaps the local coffee shop…
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