» UI Design

I wanted to do a quick product review for a product I started using today.  It’s called Litmus.  You got to see it to believe it!  It rocks!

Stumbled upon a gem of an article/essay; A Brief History of Web Design, written by a South African graphic designer, Ben Ceglowski. It’s a wonderfully thorough account of the evolution of visual design of the internet medium. The essay starts with a bit of a history lesson on how the internet as we know it came to be, and guides you through some of the technological advances of markup language, and how it’s impacted the ability of visual designers to work within the perceived limitations of web constraints — creating an artform within itself. It’s well worth the read, and bravo to Mr. Ceglowski for taking the time to put together such an impressive information piece. I found it very insightful, makes me wonder how it will evolve next. Let me know what you think.

Smashing Magazine recently cited some design trends for 2009. As a designer that’s seen the evolution of the web from it’s early incarnations in the mid 90’s to where it is today, I’m noticing some design styles and practices that are starting to come full circle. Because of the accessibility of CSS-based layouts, web and screen design is starting to break away from the standard web paradigm that dominated in the early part of this decade; left logo, horizontal nav bar, flash brand area, neatly clustered sub-content boxes — to large expansive displays of content, vertically and horizontally. Bandwidth and screen resolution no longer seems limiting. Designers have evolved from designing within a 780 pixel wide area to designing wide layout-breaking backgrounds for widescreen displays of up to 1980 pixels wide. For designers like myself, there’s a opportunity to expand the boundaries of what is generally thought of as baseline web design architecture. But doing so effectively, and maintaining the end goal of optimizing the experience for clients, users, and ultimately consumers is the core challenge. Pretty layouts, and ego-centric design can be nice on the eyes, be the main question usually is… will it drive the sale?

There seems to be an ongoing debate within our agency on how much time should be spent on information architecture.  In retrospect, I think the main reason we previously focused so much time on information architecture was because we needed a client sign off and found it more efficient to make changes in this stage.  But what happens when we’re working on one of our own start ups?  How should we approach information architecture?

The below snippet is from a 30 page set of wireframes that we provided to Aspen Snowmass when we designed and developed their booking engine user interface.  Information architecture was a must for this project because making changes in the development phase would have been extremely inefficient.

37Signals in their Getting Real book, swears by building out the interface first.  “Too many apps start with a program-first mentality. That’s a bad idea. Programming is the heaviest component of building an app, meaning it’s the most expensive and hardest to change. Instead, start by designing first.” (more…)

After several weeks of hard planning, I’m sure that Peter Corbett of IStrategyLabs is glad to know that the Apps for Democracy was a huge success.  I’m glad that BOALT took home the agency 1st prize and was able to build an application that was going to help the community so much. So what’s next for DCHistoricTours.com?

After speaking with D.C.’s Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, last night, he told me that one of the reasons we were chosen was because they wanted to use our application on main D.C. inauguration website.  This would provide the many anticipated visitors this January a helpful resource to learn more about our nation’s capitol.  I thought that was pretty exciting so naturally I stayed up last night wondering what I could do to improve the app. (more…)

For the past couple of weeks since we decided to submit an application to the Apps for Democracy Innovation Contest we’ve been hard at work. After many sleepless nights, triple caramel macchiatos (or was that a quad) and more QA testing, our app is almost here.  I’ve been getting several emails from industry colleagues asking me how things are coming along and I decided to post a screenshot this glorious morning. The tempature is supposed to reach 70 today in D.C. and it’s the middle of November.  Wow, who would have known, I would moved up here a long time ago.  You’ll all be able to play with the app early next week, until then - sayonara.

Sexy creative is not enough to generate leads and orders through the web.  There are many different attributes that can ultimately affect your bottom line. The concept is not too hard to understand but most of our clients don’t want to spend money on multivariate or A/B testing.

Take a look at our startup, RushMyPassport.com.  We average approximately 100 orders a day and a redesign of our homepage increased our sales by almost $4k per day. Yep, that’s right, over $100k a month.

So, what’s the secret formula.  It’s not rocket science, the trick is get over yourself, it’s not about what you want. It’s about what the masses want. Once you understand this, you’ll attain more than desirable results.