Best practices evaluated in the list include messaging to users, navigation and way-finding, visual and architectural hierarchy, and task efficiency.
I am recommending that every product be evaluated once a year at a minimum for a baseline. Then teams may revisit their report and score as improvements are launched.
Please note that a perfect score is exceedingly rare and the goal should be to always be improving the score. If the score is always moving in the right direction then we know our experiences are always improving as well.
AOL folks can find the checklist on our design guide here:
AOL UX Checklist
Well, it's been a few years since the book "Skip Intro" by Duncan McAlester and Michelangelo Capraro. I'm guessing that its lessons weren't quite absorbed by the web strategists for each of the presidential campaigns.
A thorough analysis of each site would be a worthwhile effort for several articles, but for now let's just take a look at how each site employs the splash screen.
For those of us that think visually and like to click on pictures (ok, that's most of us btw), PicLens is a pretty amazing app that brings the Web to life as a visual medium. Just download the extension and PicLens turns image and video feeds from top sources into an interactive "wall of media" that animates smoothly across your screen. So smoothly, in fact, that you may actually get motion sickness playing with it (like I did).
Like most interactive things it really has to be experienced to be appreciated. If you have ever felt that image or video search should be more compelling than this one is certainly for you. I recommend everyone on my team try it out. Though if you haven't wanted a more visual, interactive Internet than this plug-in will probably go into the "cool things" bookmark graveyard you never go back to visit. I do believe the new "Shop Amazon" feature is a stretch though.
Speaking as the General Manager of PIXCETERA, this one is a tough act to follow I must admit.
Apture is a killer new publishing application that lets you hook interactive multi-media modules from the Web onto your editorial. It has to be experienced to be really understood, so, for example, if you were writing a blogpost on the Aurora Borealis and wanted to provide definitions, pictures, and video from top sources like Wikipedia and YouTube, you could do so with just a couple of clicks. And then your audience gets to experience multi-media and related content on your website.
It's rare I say "wow" these days since I'm steeped in the Web all the time, but I have to say that this particular capability is stunning in its implications. Now ANYONE can have a site that is supported by some of the Web's top content providers (the Web 2.0 ones, that is).
Here are some examples of media stitched into a sentence (overdone for effect):
"The Summer's reigning blockbuster is still Iron Man, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hot on it's heels. Me, I'm now rooting for The Incredible Hulk. And Will Smith's Hancock has yet to take a bow."
OK, the sentence is bad, but the multimedia in-page is really differentiating. Only real flaw is if there is no great content on any of those properties accessible within the application. For this type of interactive plug-and-play experience I can sure live with that.
This set of selections is totally subjective, not endorsed by AOL, slightly skewed toward design, and, ultimately, pointless in nature.
warner bros.
When the LogoLounge authors reviewed 27,000 logos for the compilation of their fourth book, they noticed several trends. On the whole, designers are moving away from artificial highlights/Photoshop tricks and moving toward a more clean + vivid era.
The image about showcases four of the trends -- foldover letterforms, fine line drawings, flourishes (which have been around for quite some time, so I'm surprised to see them still in play), and jawbreakers. See all the 2008 trends on logolounge.com
Moo.com- An ingenious printing press allowing users to create paint-swatch-esque "moo cards". The cards come in a petite box and can be used as a mini collection of images or as satisfying business cards.
Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years- MOMA's illustrious flash experience devoted to the sculptor. Full screen images of work with a nice splitting zygote menu for effect.
Checkland Kindleysides- The most soothing promotional design site EVER. Imagine: a paper tree blows leisurely in the wind while you look at hard-hitting design work for some of the largest corporations in the world. The navigation is as fluid as the calming background music.
PostSecret- A cheap and easy (yet so gratifying) blog. Concepting off of I can Has Cheezburger, this blog takes random doodlings, drawings, photos and offers them vulnerable narratives.
Blurb- Make your own book. Blurb allows users to download software and put together a collection of images/words for a very captivating price. It seems to offer more options than iphoto and has a FANTASTIC URL.
Much thanks to the creative team behind this one: Mike Costantino, Amzed Hussain, John Kilpatrick and a host of others. Read more about their app here: http://www.apple.com/webapps/entertainment/aoltvlistingsforiphone.html
The TV listings app is the latest in a series of apps we've been working on. There are a bunch more to follow, and I'll be sharing them here with you as we get through them.
Next up is AOL Money and Finance's Quotes app. Check it out on your iPhone at iphone.money.aol.com.
Please let me know if you think of something that you think would make a great iPhone app-- maybe we'll make it happen...
This past weekend was hectic for the New York art scene. The grand Armory Show came to Chelsea along with a slew of other less exalted fairs. The crowning event for me was the cultish photo event, the Slideluck Potshow, at the Chelsea Art Museum.
Slideluck originally began as a social gathering in an apartment and quickly burgeoned into a massive party. The main concept of Slideluck is based around the dual interaction of a potluck and a slide-show. An attendee must bring food/beverage to participate in the slide-show watching, which begins post desultory shop-talk and a grub session of mostly chocolaty deserts. The participating photographers range from celebrated professional to emerging amateur, but the images are always of the highest caliber. The participating audience is a mixed bag, but all are welcome to attend.
The most recent Slideluck was the first true combination of still photography and multimedia. The past attempts to include audio beyond music didn't succeed due to the overly-chatty atmosphere of the events. The recent combination of fewer freebie- hunters (the event is now paid-membership based), the leveled architecture of the Chelsea Art Museum, and the sophisticated content of the multimedia, fostered an attentive crowd. Or perhaps we now just expect more than images...
The once wee face of Slide-luck is converting into a diversified project-- both in location and work presented. It's worth the membership.
At this year's South By Southwest (SxSW) conference, I had the pleasure of listening to Kathy Sierra speak about how to create passionate users. She reminded us that we can make our audience fall in love with our experiences if we can make them feel great about themselves while on our sites.
Here are some of her suggestions on how to do this:
> Try to create human-ness in our designs. Recreate subtle, real-world elements -- like the iPhone screen scroll bounce -- in our animations to make things feel more alive.
> Read facial expressions during usability tests -- you have to see people's faces (not just read a report afterwards) because we naturally simulate other people's thoughts in our own brain. When we see a face frowning, we infer what that person is thinking. They're not articulating it, but we can see it and use those perceptions to influence our design strategies. (Click "Read More")
According to a recent Stanford News Service report, Standford researchers are developing a camera exceeding our two dimensional standards.
Professor Abbas El Gamal and a team of students are embarking on research to develop a three-dimensional camera containing 12,616 lenses as opposed to the single lens in two-dimensional SLRs. Stanford News Service reports, "they've shrunk the pixels on the sensor to .7 microns, several times smaller than the pixels in standard digital cameras." These pixels are further grouped into arrays of 256 with a lens topping each array.
The coolest thing about this proposed invention is its depth perception and quality. Imagine having the ability to upload images and instead of viewing and editing a flat surface, different planes of the image are navigable and alterable. Direct your 'crop' tool to take you five feet into the frame instead of 20 pixels from the top and side. The quality of the imagery would lead you into gigapixel territory, eliminating the antiquated 'megapixel' devices.
Cost and size? Cheaper than your current point and shoot, and smaller than your cell phone. Now if that isn't photo-progress, I'm not really sure what is.
I've been fortunate enough to participate in the brilliant taste tests that AOL Food has started to hold on a regular basis. Thus far I have shot peanut butter spoon-fulls, Valentines Chocolate, candy bar cross-sections, and most recently 52 frozen pizzas.
While most of these classy cuisines have been presented in a Consumer Reports format, the candy bar cross-sections are available in quiz form. You think you know what the innards of a Snickers Bar look like? From my perspective, a spelunkers dream. And if you want to see more disorienting cross sections of not so delectable gastronomic inventions, check out the Cross-Sectioning site.
Valo keeps me coming back with a hypnotic audio/visual gameplay mechanic that makes it part game, part nifty science project. I'd be remiss to not point it out to people who enjoy experiencing the unusual (especially when it works). It's also the kind of game we at Games.com would be remiss to ignore.
I've always had visceral reactions to political paraphernalia . I remember ogling my father's I LIKE IKE pin when I was younger, wondering if Ike was a favored relative or a loved dairy product. And then there was the incident in the FAO Schwartz store, where I cried violently because my father wouldn't buy me a Bob Dole hand puppet.
And now I've stumbled across the CafePress political mecca of paraphernalia. Hand puppets, laminated items, t-Shirts, and tote bags represent mudslinging, lobbying, campaigning, parodying in one convenient location and in a variety of sizes.
The trek to the White House has been one of complete accessibility-- from powerhouse candidate webpages, to the CNN streamed debates, to facebook groups, to CafePress's consumerist appeal. And what's so appealing about this accessibility? Beyond the obvious fact that information is readily available, the opportunity for mass participation is as easy as an upload button or as obscure as throwing a sheep at a candidate. The phrase that 'every vote counts' is now extended to every myspace friend, every connected stream, and every submitted t-shirt design. Participation is becoming more creative.
Sorry about the delay in getting the promised software round-up from Macworld out, but not only did I comeback from the conference with a suitcase full of new goodies, I also came back with a head full of a nasty virus that kept me in bed asleep most of last week.
The first product I want to talk about has already started to change the way I'm sharing design comps for feedback. On the face of it, Skitch is just another very cool screen capture tool for the Mac. It lets you capture all or part of the screen, as well as click on interface elements (such as a window or the Dock) to capture them isolated from all other elements on the screen. Once the screen is captured, the image is brought into the Skitch interface, where you have some simple drawing tools that allow you to add labels and then save the final results to your desktop.
And if that were all Skitch did, it would still rank as one of the best screen capture apps I have tried. However, Skitch goes one step further, by giving you single button publishing of the image either to your own .Mac account or to the Skitch.com, which works a lot like a YouTube for still images. You can email out the link to your screen capture and get feedback directly on the page or the viewer, if they have the Skitch application on their own machine, can download the image, add their own comments directly and then (with the press of a single button) put their changes back into the originating Skitch.com page.
The up-shot of this is that, rather than passing around screenshots in emails with bulleted lists of vague comments underneath, we can use the image to enter a running dialog with each other with the image being the focus and, hopefully, provide more accurate and meaningful feedback during during development. I've only just started working with Skitch and it is still in beta (although seems perfectly stable), so there may be some bumps ahead as I try to integrate this app into my work flow, but I invite everyone on the Blog to download Skitch and give it a try.
