Welcome to the blog of Johannesburg creative agency Nicework. A fine selection of the best creative ideas, art, design and advertising.
Apostol Tnokovski is an industrial designer from Macedonia. He is also a Lady Gaga fan. Because of his immense design talent, we won’t hold that against him. He made her a piano, which is awesome, regardless of how many times they play Alejandro on the radio…
via: yankodesign.com
Every now and then we come across a website that is so spectacularly unusable that it warrants mention. The Tuks FM site cannot be navigated. In order to navigate, one is expected to hover over a portion of the illustration, endure the associated animation and then click the link adjacent. Nothing is labelled unless you mouse over it. So, using the website is a sort of lucky-packet experience – you might just hover over the nav item you want and if you are lucky, you will be able to click it. If you are able to actually click on the links, each one is accompanied by a loading page and another confusing interaction. Flash is a usability fail. Its also an SEO fail. Elements of it are great but with HTML 5 starting to gain traction, its fast becoming redundant.
Companies seem intent on pissing users off. It takes about 10 minutes to write down what you want a user to accomplish on your site and a further 10 to write down what you imagine users want to accomplish on your site. A couple of calls or short conversations with people in your identified target group about their informational goals will give you some insight into whether you are on the right track. Then all you have to do is work toward creating an environment where people can successfully fulfil their website goals – and if you have done your homework, yours.
We often draw on brick-and-mortar analogies to help contextualise user-centric web design. Would you open a shop with no windows and a tiny door 2 metres above the ground that required shoppers to climb the wall and crawl through the hole to drop into your shop? No. You wouldn’t. So why make it so difficult for website visitors to do the virtual-equivalent thereof?
Banksy is a street artist. Some of his work fetches as much as £10 000. Some people call his work vandalism. So he “vandalised” the rubbish bins of 1000 poor households in London and turned that argument on its head.
via: The Poke
So, we do lots of websites. The story is usually the same: discovery, content strat and generation, prototyping and design, code, launch. There are, of course, many other things that might need to be done: usability testing, complex interaction design, technology, etc…
When we started doing this we thought very differently about what the ciritcal elements in the make up of a great website are. Over the years though, we have come to the conclusion that it all comes down to content. Good information. The design can be very mediocre, the code messy, the navigation adequate but bad content = ultimate fail.
So, to that end we modified our approach to be content centric and thanks to clever people like Catherine Green, we are doing better sites.
If you are interested in this kind of thing, check out Jakob Neilsen. He is an old school usability guru. Im always amazed by the quality and simplicity of his writing (always backed by mind numbing volumes of data). Check out this article on how users read your website!
The highlights:
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