23 Musings

The Google homepage rarely changes in anyway except for their tradition of adding themed logo's to go with the season, holiday or event. Japan though has had a treat and the homepage of www.google.co.jp.

The new design is not available in every location (I can't see it) but it looks much better with the addition of tabs (see below).

It really would be nice to see a redesign of the main Google homepage, I'm sure with all the services they offer it is about time they offered a better way for them to be accessed from Google.com. The tabbed design would allow them to make their services more prominent while keeping them easy to access.

The BBC have launched their much blogged about, widget based, drag & drop homepage this week.

I gave it a once over while still in beta and my opinion hasn't changed. I love it!

It's a fantastic design job and so easy to use. It's obviously had a usability agency all over it to ensure it meets the needs of as many users as possible too.

Here's an amusing look at the web back in 1996, the year I started designing myself. I would provide links back to some of the sites I built using the internet archive but sadly all have so many broken links they aren't worth viewing. I'll post up anonymised screenshots of a range of sites I've built another day...

If only web design was still so simple :-)

I love design and I'm not just talking web. In this article from Smashing Magazine they've listed some of the most interesting and futuristic designs that may (or may not) be used for devices and the like in the coming year.

I particularly like this as an example of a really cool design for a CD player:

The BBC have released a beta of their homepage featuring Netvibe/Google'esque personal homepage features and loads of AJAX.

I like it. Very clean, well laid out, intuitive to navigate, the AJAX drag and drop is really easy to use. It's very web 2.0 in looks though and they may have taken that style a little too far but it is a vast improvement and looks extremely usable. Good job BBC!

Drawter is great! Just found this gem of a site and it's already come in useful.

Now I'm a hand coder of HTML, have been for 12 years, so perfectly happy creating HTML and CSS in a text editor. Sometimes though I just want to do something simple and quickly and that's where Drawter helps.

It allows you to create basic HTML layouts using CSS really quickly by drawing out the elements you want and then generating the code.

Highly recommend you have a play. Obviously it's great for beginners too as you can see the layout and then relate the code back to it (a good way to learn).

I had a good read of the new specification for HTML 5 last night. It's supposed to break us free from the constraints of HTML 4 and the browsers (at least it will allow browser manufacturers to take things one step forwards). HTML 5 introduces a lot of interesting new features such as semantics, API compatibility, improved form controls and more. Some of the simplified mark-up should also make barriers to entry much lower, I also believe that the creators of WYSIWYG tools will find it much easier to create new web based tools to create sites based on HTML 5 due to the simplification of the document.

Rather than write a full review I suggest you go and read the write up from A List Apart here.

Smashing Magazine today has and article looking at some of the amazing developments coming in the way we as users experience interacting with technology. The list of coming interfaces includes Microsoft Surface which I've blogged about before. User experience could change dramatically and where we are now all thinking about a flat screen we could in the future be thinking of all sorts of 3D, multi-level, complex interfaces.

Well worth a read!

A great presentation from Elliot Jay Stocks at the Future of Web Design the other day:

Less is more it would seem when it comes to search interfaces. Just look at Google to see the less-is-more approach at it's best. Their minimal approach to the search homepage works really well, although I do think a big reason for that is that their algorithm is much better at returning relevant results with minimal input from the user.

Prof. John Maeda of MIT Media Lab had put together an interesting image showing the development of both Google and Yahoo's homepage over time. It's really interesting to see how Yahoo lost their way and Google stayed true to the minimal approach. Click the image below to see a full size version:

Here's a useful link from Apple's Developer Connection which tells you all you need to know to get your web site or application ready for use by iPhone users.

To be honest it should be fairly straightforward as it's the Safari 3 engine under the hood of the iPhone so if it works in Safari it should be fine in iPhone. Of course you may want to look at serving up a different version scaled to fit the iPhone as I for one find the zoom browse of modern phones a pain in the neck*. I'd much rather use a web app that sizes itself to the device I am using, it makes the browsing experience so much easier.

Anyway, the link above has all you need to know and some handy hints on how to utilise mail and maps on the iPhone. If you're in any doubt about whether your app will work on iPhone then read the above.

*Of course, AT&T's lousy 2G connection speeds make the browsing experience a pain in the neck anyway at the moment for anyone who owns an iPhone.

Good article on the BBC website citing Jakob Nielsens comments regarding the state of web design today and it's impact on users. Jakob says that the hype about Web 2.0 is making web firms neglect the basics of good design and said that the rush to make webpages more dynamic often meant users were badly served. He said sites peppered with personalisation tools were in danger of resembling the "glossy but useless" sites at the height of the dotcom boom.

Valid points by Mr Nielsen, but I believe this is just indicative of a boom (yes the web is booming). There are so many people trying to jump into the online arena that many are bound to overlook the basics, also with so many design firms out there more of them are going to be of a lower quality (same as happened in the dotcom boom). There will always be badly designed sites, and with the temptation to add endless filters, widgets and features there will be many mistakes made along the way.

Don't fall into the trap of adding features for features sake, make them useful and usable if you want customers to keep coming back!

ZenZui is a new mobile phone interface being developed by a company which came out of Microsoft Research and now runs independently although funded by Microsoft's IP Ventures.

They've created a zoomable interface for mbile phones which is looking pretty good from the demo video they've created.

Designed by experts in human computer interaction it really does look like a step forwards in how we can access information on the small screen. Just looking at the demo video shows me that the interface has the potential to remove a lot of the frustrations that I come across while browsing the web on my N73.

Check out the demo below:

I'm in shock! I've just become aware of the debacle surrounding the Italian governments new tourism website which promotes their country to potential visitors.

This is the story of the Italian National Tourism Portal which has recently appeared online after three years (the project began 16th March 2004). Created by IBM the site launched to derision worldwide from the blogosphere and from Italians themselves. It's amazing that such a huge sum of money can be spent on a website which doesn't appear particularly complex. Far more sophisticated websites are created all the time with budgets a fraction of this spend. Rumour has it that the logo alone cost €100,000!

Design wise it looks pretty good, but it doesn't work on all browsers, has a lot of copy errors and very poor translation, accessibility is shocking and it's incredibly slow to browse around.


Apparently it's not the worst offending government sponsored money-pit website, rumour has it that the German employment office site cost an astounding €160 million! Both of these sites are scandalous wastes of public money, something far better could have been produced for far less money!

A telling bit of research from those guys at Webcredible (the usability and design consultancy) has shown that your average web shopper takes factors such as design and brand more seriously than security when choosing sites to purchase from.

Not really a huge surprise at all! What was surprising to me was that 40% of respondents said that they looked for it to say 'https' in the address bar. This shows that web users are getting more savvy and I'm certain that even a year ago that number would have been much lower. I'd expect a repeat of this study in a years time will show that security is the deciding factor and brand/design will matter less to users looking to buy.

Webcredible advise online retailers to:

1. Provide written assurance about security policies
2. Include user reviews and have other site visitors rate the reviewers
3. Provide links to references of the company on other websites
4. Ensure content is up-to-date across the website
5. Include details of any affiliations or awards

All really good advise and great ways to build up trust with your customers in the online environment. One basic point they have missed is applying a seal (eg. Verisign) to your website on the checkout page, research I conducted last year with our customers showed that a lot of users will buy purely if they see the seal without regard for https or not.

In a fairly major departure from Google's usual habits of plain, clean, white web pages they are now offering users of their personalised (read Web 2.0/Ajax) homepage an option to have a nice colourful background in the header area. The internet search box at the top of the homepage is placed in panoramic settings that change with the time of day and the weather. A nice touch, and with Google homepage gaining penetration it's sure to attract some usage.

The 'skins' will be unveiled today and are sure to go down well with all but the die hard Google users. And the fact that these decorations change with the time and weather is also a new draw to get people to try their homepage for themselves.

Apparently the designs will also contain surprises, such as easter eggs that will pop out at (wait for it) Easter, and one would expect a jolly red man perhaps at Xmas...

Here's an example:

More from the Sydney Morning Herald here.

When it's time to redesign or tweak your e-commerce website what areas should you focus on? Is it just a matter of rebuilding from scratch or applying a new coat of paint? Or are there key areas you should be focusing on?

Help is at hand... Jakob Nielsen, that bastion of usability and helpful tips (although I know some people don't agree with everything he says and I'm one of them) has published a new article titled 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities.

There's some really good points on where you should focus your efforts so this is well worth a read for anyone who wants to increase their conversion rate and get more revenue.

Nice little app here called CSSFly which allows you to view any web page and edit it in real time while seeing the results instantly in the browser. It works by caching a copy of a page and updating with any changes to the code you make.

Could be very useful for any CSS/XHTML developers who want to experiment without getting their coding tools out. Also great for those of us who like to see what's under the hood of our favourite designed websites.

Progress is being made at the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group on the Web Applications 1.0 draft specification. It's starting to look very good and I'm extremely pleased that they have addressed a lot of the issues with HTML/XHTML which needed sorting out.

This draft has been published yesterday, I'd suggest all interested developers take a look and familiarise themselves with it as you can expect to see aspects of it being supported by browsers very soon.

Very useful little app I came across today that I thought I'd share. It's an Ajax based tool for creating loading indicator GIFs on the fly. There's quite a selection of styles and they come in really handy for most web designers. Example GIF below.


Check out Ajaxload!