Half Baked Ideas

Half Baked Ideas

Gavin Wye  //  I am an User Experience Designer at ORM in London. I like dog's and running. You can make the rest up yourself

May 11 / 12:39am

A content out approch

by Gavin Wye
Since reading Content Strategy last summer I've been thinking loads about how I go about designing sites that are informed by a content strategy and even those sitest that are not.
A content out approach…
So heres where I've got to so far. How can the process that we use to design and build websites empower the content. How can we ensure the the people we are designing sites for, get the content they want. How can we convince clients that this is the content that there customers want.
Well in my opinion it goes a lot further back in the design process than the content actually it starts with research. Take your resurch and boil it down in to things (tasks or goals) that people want to do. Make sure that the content that your commissioning or that your client is providing fulfils these goals.
 
Start designing from the content out. Start with real content in your wireframes and make sure that from the ground up the content is structured well. First on paper and then creating documents I'm thinking about doing this in html and just start creating links between the content. You don't have to have complete finished content it can be really sketchy at the moment but the content should always aid your customers in the goals or tasks that you said you wanted to acheve.
The good thing about this approch is that you cant help but design it inclusivley. Your not using any CSS at the moment or javascript this is just building a very simple old fashined website without any fluff. So now you have something that is designed inclusivley. It's going to work fore people without javascript and for people who dont have flash.
The good thing about this content out approch is that you can start thinking about how all the contnet fits together right from the start. I'd advocate putting this in front of clients very early and letting them ask questions of the content.
It's very early days for me with this approach and I'm yet to use it in a live project but I'll post back here when I've been working it a bit and let you know how it's going. I'd be interested to know if anyone else is using a similar approach to this or even if I'm just stating the obvious.
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Mar 24 / 4:16pm

This UX magic is remarkable

by Gavin Wye
I've been using this really sweet app called Alfred for a while. It's in beta and they released a new version the other day.
I'm falling in love with this app for a couple of reasons.

  1. They released a new beta version approximately two weeks after they released the first. With only three people in the team that built the app thats nice and quick and you get points for reacting quickly in my book.
  2. The app is filled with magic. Look at the screen shot below. First of all there is a tab labeled experimental. They are setting my expectations right from the start. and then at the bottom of the window there is a button that says special do not press. Of course I pressed it I had a hunch what was going to happen, I'm not going to tell you. You can probably figure out roughly what happens. And that led me to tell Pete who sits next to me.

And thats why I love it. Because it's remarkable, it's a great app but most of all I love it for being remarkable. They could have done nothing they launched something and it worked. But the very fact that they took the time to do this makes the app remarkable Seth Godin's remarkable as described in his book purple cow the type of thing that makes people want to talk about it.

You can't buy that kind of marketing.
 
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Feb 18 / 10:39am

Tesco club card app

by Gavin Wye
Tesco recently launched their Clubcard App for the iPhone, Ben Dodson tweeted about it on Monday and summed up how effective and simple the app is. I'm in complete agreement with him about the effectiveness of the app but what I think is more interesting is the fact that customer will have to hand their iPhone over to a complete stranger in order for them to scan the barcode. In my opinion thats a big ask. I'm okay lending my phone to close friends but handing it over to a stranger thats a prized possession they now have in their hand a thing of beauty that I cherish. What if they drop it? I haven't tried this yet but I'm going to tonight. so I'll report back.

This app paves the way for mobile payment systems. I've been thinking about this recently at work and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered about how you actually get consumers to feel safe using this kind of technology. It needs some very good interaction and product design combined to come up with an effective solution.

Back to the app, it's quite nice to set up the only thing that I think they could have done better was to go and get the card number for me once I had put my name in. It's relatively long card number and not split in to manageable chunks like a credit card number so I had to get it read out to me.

Anyway I'm off to Tescos to try it out.

     

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Filed under  //  iPhone   Shopping   UX  

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Oct 28 / 2:35pm

Overly accessable

by Gavin Wye

I was on a southern train the other day and noticed this. The effort to make all signage accessable is great but when it relates to another visual que imagane the frustration of the reader.

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Oct 28 / 3:08am

Why I dumped Wordpress

by Gavin Wye
Around about May this year I stopped writing my Wordpress blog and started using Posterous. 

Wordpress is a very nice blog but has far to many features for me I had been running my blog with it for a couple of years but it hadn't really taken off. I just spent to much time worrying about what it looked like and trying to get to the bottom of all those design problems and not writing.

Then along came Posterous it's simple just post from it you can't change the theme (you couldn't at the time they have since added theming) it's easy to setup and just works. It's elegant not over complicated. I would have probably written this about Wordpress a couple of years ago.

I just hope they don't start adding features in a bid to compete. It will be interesting to watch how Posterous develops over the next year and the amount of features that get added.
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Filed under  //  Waffle  

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Aug 28 / 2:47pm

The Spectrum of User Experience - Rev Mentor

by Gavin Wye
via revmentor.com

What more can you say

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Filed under  //  User Experience Design   UX  

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Aug 28 / 1:39pm

50 Influential Designers & Developers to Follow on Twitter | Graphic Leftovers Blog

by Gavin Wye
Check out this website I found at graphicleftovers.com

I have been thinking lately about the value I get (and give) from twitter, this looks like an interesting place to start if you want to get more value. Of course this depends on your definition of value.

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Filed under  //  Twitter   Web  

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Aug 28 / 1:33pm

From findability.org - The Real Information Architect - Adam's posterous

by Gavin Wye
via adamburke.posterous.com

I was wondering around posterous and found this I started off disagreeing with the whole IA thing while reading the definitions but by the end of the slide show I was sitting there nodding and agreeing. I still think I do more than just IA though

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Filed under  //  IA   UX  

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Jul 6 / 4:21am

My Dog

by Gavin Wye
My dog's name is Alfie here is a phot of him

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Filed under  //  Home  

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Jun 18 / 5:10am

What is a wireframe?

by Gavin Wye

Found this description of what a wire frame is though it was quite nice.
 
It's from boagworld
 
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"Fundamentally a wireframe is a tool for rapidly prototyping a website. They roughly approximate the layout, content and hierarchy of a web page as well as the relationship between pages. Effectively you are building a rough version of the site.
 
Wireframes don’t look attractive. They are not designed as such. Rather they give a sense of how things will be organised on your site. In many cases they lack colour and imagery, although there is no reason why they should. However, they do show visual hierarchy through layout, font size and shading."

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