If you were at HIVE you know it was a wonderful day. I was particularly pleased by the emergence of themes across many of the talks. This is always a good sign that your discipline is moving in a positive direction if many great thinkers and doers arrive at similar conclusions independently. Well, as independently as you can in this information sharing world of ours.

One of the themes I was most happy to hear again and again was the importance’s of having design leadership present in every company and project. A number of speakers including myself talked about this in addition to the need for experience design to be present and active throughout the project design and development cycle.

I’ll get my slides with notes up next week and hopefully we can keep the conversation going. In the meantime. If you were there, I’d love to hear what you think about this.

There are these ugly little things that appear again and again in our lives (particularly in our digital lives) and I think it’s time to speak up.

Not only are they ugly they give you a negative jolt each time you encounter them and THEY NEED TO BE REDESIGNED. I’ll be calling them out as I find them in hopes that someone will hear our cries.

So, I was going through the beautiful, well designed flow of  Two of Us. Then I  clicked the button to record my smile and BOOM the Adobe Flash Player Settings module. Grrrr.

It looks scary. It’s as though it was designed to encourage folks to “Deny” it.

The experience I was in, is now over and I’m no longer thinking about sending my smile into the world I’m thinking about my computer hardware, web security, identity theft, stop signs, what is that eye ball supposed to mean?, what is Flash anyway?, am I supposed to know what Flash is?, do I have the expertise to decide if I should allow this, do I have an option?, what are the risks?, where will the question mark take me?, Is that safe?, I better just quit. I don’t feel like smiling anymore.

I can’t imagine that’s what the designer of this project had hoped for. I know because I’ve had to implement this once and it was very frustrating.

We all understand that it’s necessary to ask permission for this type of activity but what message are we sending when we pop this in front of them?

If this was designed better or better yet able to be skinned like Facebook and Twitter permission messages the product designers could send a message that yes, this action is something you should understand but we have vetted it and would like you to trust us. We  are doing everything we can to protect your privacy and keep you secure while allowing you to be part of this awesome site. You are safe, keep going. You can review what you have allowed at anytime from your account page.

So please Adobe, Redesign This.

ROY ROBSON SHOPFINDER

Stats:
Map: Google Maps
Content: Store Locations
Items: 100′s

Lessons:
1. Make choices to provide value to the most people.
2. Provide lists to compliment the map.
3. Small design elements make a big difference.

Analysis:

First thing I like is that they made a choice. They have stores around the world but they chose to focus the initial map display on the area with the most stores, probably the most customers too; hence helping the majority of the folks get what they need quicker. The choice is also successful in communicating to it’s core audience that they have a ton of stores and one is bound to be near you.  They do have stores in Iran and Uganda but would the experience benefit from showing a map of the world?  How would they show pins when the distribution is so unequal?  They easily mitigate the problem of Iranians not seeing a their stores on first view by bringing the Shopfinder front and center. It is always best practice to provide a list to supplement the map experience. In this case the availability of the list allowed them to make a choice to focus the map on a certain part of the world.

Also of note:
You can quickly zoom in and out with a scroll of the mouse.
The pins contrast well on the map and the white outline allows them to be stacked and overlapping and still be clickable.
I love the full screen view of the map.

Selecting “Choose country” opens the list and the list stays open. There are enough moving parts in a map interface. Try to reduce rollovers and other moving functions. Simple click to open click to close is refreshing and so nice to use.  This interaction model is repeated when interacting with the pins.

Also of note:  Get directions takes to Google Maps. I think it’s ok to not try to do everything within your map interface. Take it to the level that brings value to your company and the visitor then go ahead and send them to Google (or other map program). They will be familiar with it and probably have data saved like their address eliminating a number of clicks and steps.

Selecting a country refreshes the page bringing you a new map focused on the country you selected. I like the page refresh avoiding the tempting “zoom in/out and move the map in some crazy animation” instinct.

Once there we are given another list that reflects the information on the map.

You can also change the country without going back. Nice.

Select a city get a list of the stores. Although it should zoom in to the selected city but it doesn’t.

Over all I think this is a super successful map design.  What do you think?

I’ll post more as I find them.

His new design is clean and pretty. He thought about how he uses it and how it could become a useful tool for navigating the airport and boarding the plane.

It’s successful for the most part, although I think the target audience for this is me, you and Tyler and maybe not the general public, as we are used to seeing design like this, it may be a bit sophisticated and hard to read for the average flyer. Actually let me correct myself,  the non-average traveler, the most general of the public.

I was thinking though, aside from solving usability issues which would be great. There is an amazing missed opportunity in boarding passes.

Boarding passes represent a specific moment and place in time.

I’d like to see the airlines take full advantage of this. Let’s see the day’s news headlines or ‘It happened today’ facts. How about local history, art and statistics. What about statistics or facts about the relationship between the two locations you are traveling. Ooooh, the poetry of local poets on seasonally appropriate topics. I could keep going, but you get the point.

Some airlines are using the unused portion of the print at home boarding pass to provide travel information, this is nice, but my ideas could turn these into collectibles, kinda like posted stamps. Have some imagination Mr and Mrs Airline.

A: KEXP

for the following reasons….

.

The bookmark metaphor

The color coded medium identifiers (colored dots, key in the top left)

Getting a nice preview of the work

Navigating with arrow keys

It mimics the experience of walking through a gallery.

It utilizes the wide screen (i have one so I like it)

I’m so so about the audio announcing each artist. As a an English speaker I enjoy hearing how to pronounce the names.  It is a bit futuristic and creepy though.

(I found the site via SiteInspire)

I like this site.*

1. The colors and texture are really pleasing and unexpected for a staffing site.

2. I’m a fan of using the main navigation to tell the story. By placing it in the middle of the page what’s inside the site is elevated to something worth exploring not just a bunch of links pushed to the side or up in the corner.

This placement allows the eyes to bounce through each navigation label and build a quick understanding of what the site and/or company has to offer.

3. The subtle animations in the hero and the headers of the sub pages are smooth, interesting and add to the experience.

*Yes, there are places it falls apart, especially on some of the internal pages, but I suspect the final comps and interaction plan before development and months of little changes by various business interests, were really great.

I can not distinguish between them.

I need the label to understand them.

My eyes hurt.

This is such a beautiful and effective site. I love the the subtlety of the navigation and social media links.

The colors are excellent.
My eyes moves around easily finding everything I would expect to find.

and who could deny the beauty and brillance of this?  check out the site to experience the roll over interaction.

This tour will be in Portland on Sunday. Maybe I’ll see you there.

I’ve noticed that the best creative minds tend to work in multiple mediums. They have a primary focus, something they really do well, but they always have something else going on on the side or regularly try new creative endeavors.

Keeping my creative pursuits diversified is really important to me. I find it particularly important for those of us who work primarily in the digital realm to spend time working with physical materials. This isn’t a problem for me I love to sew and make art of all kinds, but recently I’ve been a bit stuck and haven’t be able to decide what to work on, so last week I ran a little contest. I guess I was crowd-sourcing inspiration.…

I asked my twitter friends to submit their favorite word. I randomly selected one of the words and made something for the winner inspired by the word.  It worked. I went down into my studio and created something that night.  Here’s what I made inspired by the word ABUNDANCE.

It may not be the most amazing thing in the world but it was fun to survey all the materials I had, consider the word and make something for someone else.

I mailed it off to Noah and he received it today. “He said it was, “cheery and delightful”,  so I may have missed the mark creating something “Abundant” but I’ll take it

So what diversified creative thinkers do you admire?

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