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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