The amount of information that we’re bombarded with increases every day. Processing the numerous links to websites, videos and photos is one thing, but how do we keep track of what we’ve seen so that we can refer back to it at a later date?
Bookmarks are the traditional solution; file away a link to the website in your browser for safe-keeping. Yet I’ve found myself bookmarking websites very rarely of late, relying instead on my memory to recall which appropriate websites I could visit or what I could type into Google to find what I was looking for. Does the bookmark paradigm scale effectively to deal with the massive amount of information that we encounter?
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Published in Productivity, tagged bookmarks, organisation, relevance on 20th May 2008. No comments.
Archives are often something that are left until the last minute and I don’t think anyone really considers how best to create them. Designers often throw together a chronological list of posts and leave it at that. However, I stumbled across a design by Kyle Meyer today that’s a brilliant solution to the archive problem. On his website Astheria, he represents his archive visually, altering the distance between posts to show fluctuations in frequency.
Clever, isn’t it? How is it done? Well all he’s done is dynamically style the list items, altering their top margin according to the difference in dates. I guess that this is done in a custom PHP script he’s written to grab and display his blog content. The rest is just done with CSS.
Published in Design, Websites, tagged CSS, minimalism, organisation on 24th April 2008. No comments.
In a world with countless choices, presenting people with relevant information should be one of the most important aspirations for any designer. This can be achieved on the web and in software in a number of ways, but let’s begin with a more mundane example. Many shoe shops organise their displays by type - hiking shoes here, trainers there, heels that way - but this is a fundamental mistake.
When I walk into a shoe shop, I may or may not know what type of footwear that I’m after, but one thing I know for sure is my size. Organising shoes by type might be more aesthetically pleasing, but in practice all people need to be presented with are shoes that actually fit them. Grouping shoes by design is natural because our minds like to associate things that look the same, but in fact the most logical way is to organise shoes based on the single criteria that the customer will almost definitely know.
This idea translates directly on to the web. T-shirt site Threadless has a stock chart page whose title is “Tell us your size, we’ll tell you what’s in stock! Fo REAL!” Once you know your size, you can quickly view a selection of shirts which are only relevant to you. Rival site Busted Tees doesn’t have this option and suffers for it, only alerting you to a lack of stock once you get to a product page.
Another good example of using the correct criteria to organise products is IKEA. They first present you items for each room, then later give you the option of seeing similar products. When you walk into a store, you go through model bedrooms, kitchens and so on, then only later are shown all of the beds, lights and tables together. The idea behind this is that the one thing that the customer knows is what rooms they have. They may arrive looking for a table, but you can be certain that they know where they’re going to put it.
So the next time you visit somewhere that presents you with choices or design something that does the same, think for a second what your most basic criteria is. The best methods of organisation are not necessarily the most obvious ones.
Published in Design, Usability, tagged IKEA, organisation, relevance, Threadless on 21st February 2008. No comments.