I have a shortcut to medium.com on the home screen of my Android phone. It’s there because I browsed the site a couple of times and Chrome’s app install banners prompted me to add it to my home screen, so I did. Some time later I launched the site from the shortcut icon and it opened and loaded so quickly that I actually thought it had retrieved a copy from an offline cache. But it hadn’t, it was just very well optimised. So ten points to the Medium team for that.
Today I launched the site from the shortcut again – but this time the experience was somewhat different. So different that I have to take away all the points I previously awarded to the team. The problem is that when I launched the site today, I had the door emphatically slammed in my face.
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Last year I began exploring the idea of the uncanny valley as it applies to creating prototypes, using a panel from Understanding Comics as an illustration. Lukas Mathis at UX Magazine has had a similar idea, but explored it in much more depth and with greater clarity.
I work as an Information Architect / Developer, and I’m a big fan of comics. For my IA work I refer frequently to the work of Jesse James Garrett, especially his Elements of User Experience book, and as a fan of comics I recently read (again) Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
I’m not saying that to boast of my geek credentials, but to introduce something I never imagined I’d find: a connection between the two.
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The ongoing documentation of Mark Boulton Design’s redesign of the Drupal website is providing some great insight into the process; Leisa Reichelt’s latest post, on the community wireframing project, is a prime example. Now – whether by happy serendipity or a desire to compete – WordPress have begun to do likewise.
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Mark Boulton Design have been selected to redesign drupal.org, the website of the Drupal CMS. I’m a big admirer of Mark’s writing about design and typography, and I think it’s exciting that a big open-source project is going in this direction.
Now, if we could get him to design the Drupal user interface (as Veerle Pieters is doing with Expression Engine), that would really be something.
I’ve been doing quite a lot of site mapping recently, and looking for a way to escape the standard boxy top-down view. In searching for examples of different ways to present the information, that are pleasing to look at but still immediately convey meaning, I found a number of interesting examples.
Below are the pick of the results, along with a few that don’t quite work, and some old standbys. I wanted to include images to illustrate this, but in most cases the license didn’t allow.
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