Sunday, June 20
Sunday, June 20th, 2010 | Uncategorized
Spent morning with my family. We went to Fireworks for brunch to celebrate Father’s Day. I got home by 1pm and went straight to my desk to work.
I read Scratch Media’s many good articles on the web design process. I started with the comprehensive “The Complete No-Nonsense, Step-by-Step Guide to Desiging Websites.” The readings took some time because I read every referenced article linked in the guide. The articles are excellent. I greatly appreciated the article entitled “The Sphere of Design,” which does a nice job explaining how usability (functionality) and design (aesthetics) are not mutually exclusive but must exist in tandem. The most successful designs strike the essential balance between functionality and aesthetics, based on the specific needs of each site. The one critical take-way message driven in over and over again throughout the articles is that simplicity is the key to successful design. By the end of the readings, you actually feel prepared to execute simple designs. This was what I lost sight of last week. I started with a design concept that forgot what purpose it was serving. I started with design inspirations, forgetting about the discipline of the design process which helps one to focus on the purpose of the site and then designing functionality and aesthetics accordingly.As a result, the designs became more complicated and less successful.
As I began reading the articles on Personas and Site Personas, I began developing the questionnaire materials to do the exercises for each site development task of creating the customer profiles and the site’s profile. I ended up with a good, substantial draft of customer profiles, 4 detailed customer categories and about ten different demographic/biker category profiles. Over dinner, I asked Stanley how he would group his customers into general categories. His view was different than mine.
He broke the categories down into types of riders: 1. Harley Riders: a) the avid, great distance riders clocking a few thousand miles per season and b) casual riders, only about 500 miles per season; 2. The On-Off Road Riders: this is a small group of avid riders; 3. The Beat-Up Old Jap Bike Owners: this category of rider gets a bike dirt cheap that doesn’t run and tries to get it working on the cheap; 4. The High-Performance Jap Bike Riders: these are avid riders whose bikes need little maintenance and service other than tires and oil which are both lucrative revenue streams.
I divvied them up based on their repair skill: 1) self-sufficient DIY motorcycle repair guys/gals. Very proficient only needs parts and advice most of the time and serious help from Stanley when they hit a genuine challenging stumbling block; 2) the moderately sufficient DIY motorcycle repair guy/gal who does most of the work themselves but knows their skill limitations. When the job is too big or difficult, they bring it straight off to Stanley; 3) the rider who just rides and has no know-how or skill on the mechanical front. Prefers dropping the bike off to Stanley for all service, maintenance and repair; 4) the overconfident, poorly skilled DIY who tears bikes apart only to realize they don’t know what they are doing. They need to bring the bike to Stanley to get it to work. While different from his categorical breakdown, he found my categories interesting and on-the-mark.
I spent the rest of the evening reading the design material and trying to figure out how I was going to revise my disastrous comps from last week and keep the design process moving forward. My challenge is that I am indeed designing blind without all the benefits of the insights that come from the formal design process. I’ll plug away at the designs, fully knowing that the insights culled over the next two weeks will change for the better these preliminary designs based on my understanding of the project.
In closing, I must confess I found it is a bit strange to read serious content on the web that links to many other pages. While I have read serious articles online (or downloaded them) they usually are a one-off article, self-contained without many or even any intra-site links, well at least the sites I have been to. This was the first time that the ever expansive knowledge that a link proffers at your finger tips was so abundant. Even though I had printed-out of the articles, I’d have the page open online so as to link and read the great content referenced through the links. I must say, for someone used to books with tables of content and indexes, it was a little disorienting. Probably an indication that the information architecture could be better structured. But on one level, I did see that there was a clear, logical architecture to the presentation of the articles.
So I think I am reacting to the way the internet changes the way we assimilate information a lot more freely, not in an obligatory linear manner books propose information to users/readers. Now while one can jump around in some books and not read sequentially, the internet obviously takes this to an extreme that cannot be reproduced in print except by Surrealists and Nouveau Roman authors such as Butor who experimented with non-linear story telling. I believe it is Butor who published a unbound book which consisted of sheets of written text passages collected in a box: readers were free to “construct” their own story line, putting the sheets of text in any order they so wished. These experimental novelists who declared the author was dead encourage active reader participation in developing the story. In some ways they were responding to a human drive to be creative in non-traditional ways. The potential of the Internet, and specifically well-designed content rich sites like Scratch Media, allow us to follow leads/ideas as they emerge, our minds are free. Reading on the best Internet sites encourages creative logical thinking networks rather than restrictive linear paths of thought. All I can see is an octopus like image of a MindMap, rich and vibrant.
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