Your design meeting for the new website was standing room only. People who routinely wear mismatched socks showed up to express strong opinions on color hue, saturation, and value, and to weigh in on flat vs. skeuomorphic design. A public website for the enterprise is important — it’s a brand statement seen millions of times …
The science of website design
Few would dispute that website design is a creative exercise. A recent study by Katharina Reinecke and colleagues PDF would imply that there’s some interesting, quantifiable science baked in as well. Both common sense and studies confirm that users judge a site’s appeal within seconds. Reinecke et al. offer some compelling findings on how visual complexity …
How to manage deceptive online reviews
Via Bits Blog, an academic study on deceptive reviews explores why web reviewers make up bad things. It turns out that false negative reviews are not written predominantly by competitors or disgruntled employees. These reviewers are often loyal customers who have made multiple purchases from the company — just not the product in question. Customers writing false …
Farewell, “click here” – the disappearance of chrome
Chrome is an umbrella term for the navigational elements throughout user interface design. NN Group offers a useful description of chrome at all layers of human-computer interaction, from operating system to website to mobile app. Fun fact: Google’s browser derives its name Chrome in part from this term since it attempts to minimize visible UI chrome — most …
3 tips for timelines
I can still remember the pain of drawing history report timelines during an analog childhood. The inevitable result was a shaky line of unequal width, with at least one or two skips on the ruler, and uneven pointed arrows each end. A career in draughtsmanship did not beckon. Timelines seem like the kind of thing …
Lovely and functional football table
Most of the football visualizations I find seem to vanish after a few weeks or months, but I sure hope The Beautiful Table sticks. Designed by Jon Ferry, this lovely and functional visualization shows you how your team (in my case, sadly, Arsenal in the Premier League) is faring. There are many small details that …
Weekend reading: Just My Type & my fascination with fonts
Ignore the chick lit title — Just My Type is a wonderfully informative and gossipy exploration of fonts (thanks, Cesar). If you’re eager to learn why Garamond left an indelible mark on 16th century Paris, how Caslon cut the finest ampersand, or which master of the sans serif had a taste for ceaseless sexual experimentation, give it a …
Content & design practices from HBO Go
AllThingsD interviewed Allison Moore, SVP digital platforms at HBO. HBO Go is one of my favorite apps, and provides, just as she describes “an incredible digital experience for our customers…just like they have with our content…wherever consumers expect us to be.” The “wherever they expect us to be” part is pretty impressive, with existing or …