This is the email you get from Floresfrescas.com when you purchase flowers:
We are kinda proud of how it is designed. Its main goal is to minimize uncertainty. Some of its virtues:
It tells (and shows) right away what did you buy and when it will be delivered.
Direct invoice download.
A visual reminder that your flowers will arrive closed and will blossom after.
Info on what to do if you want to change anything (links, email adresses and even a phone number).
Minimal visual identity elements from Floresfrescas.com, just so you can identify the email quickly and without reading anything.
Print-friendly layout.
It can be read with images disabled (for those malware-aware).
Confirmation emails are a very important part of a purchase process and sometimes are ignored by interaction designers. Do you have any good examples of this? How would you improve the Floresfrescas one?
It took me a while to understand why I didn’t like it and then I realised it’s quite a simple reason. Google Buzz, like Twitter or Facebook are for entertainment while Gmail is mostly work.
When I want to concentrate I usually shut down anything distracting and focus on what I may be doing whereas it’s sketching, designing, writing emails, proposals, etc. I usually have a break every 10-15 minutes. Something short, just to check my planetaki, twitter and perhaps facebook (that happens less often). Everything is on separate tabs so work and distractions don’t get messed.
And then came Buzz with this bold number of “buzzs” right next to the number of messages in my inbox so every time I checked if there was eny new email I’d see that there was some fun going on at the Buzz Cantina and I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t have my Continuous Partial Attention the way it was supposed to be, in moderate intervals.
And friends, that is why I am shutting down buzz. Not because I don’t like it (in fact I really hate facebook for what it has and Buzz lacks) but because it’s too invasive, just like my friends throwing a party at our studio at office hours.
Where Search does a “classic search”, Re-find looks on what I already have seen (and starts digging on my social info up in the cloud) and Discover does te opposite bringing results I’ve never seen before.
I think of UCD (User-Centered Design) a little as I think of Christianism. The fact I’m an atheist today does not stop me from recognizing that some Christian values have shaped my worldview and my belief system in very positive ways.
Ariel Guersenzvaig, who knows me well and understands my take on user-centered design, refered me to Apple’s Secret? It Tells Us What We Should Love, an article that questions UCD as a tool for radical innovation. I’ve been moving from true believer in UCD to these positions over time and, although I think it’s easy to use Apple as an example, I consider this article by Roberto Verganti full of true statements:
User-centered innovation is perfect to drive incremental innovation, but hardly generates breakthroughs. In fact, it does not question existing needs, but rather reinforces them, thanks to its powerful methods.
Firms that create radical innovations make proposals. They put forward a vision. In doing that, of course, they take greater risks.
Thanks to this process these companies are serial radical innovators. Their non-user-centered proposals are not dreams without a foundation. Sometimes they fail. But when they work, people love them even more than products that have been developed by scrutinizing their needs.
User centered-design (observation, interviews, user testing, etc. ) is for those who want to improve something existing, not for those who want to create something new. Those need to understand human nature but don’t need to microscope every little behavior and take it as a starting point.
Our admired Keko Ponte (we want to cosmomeal with you!) suggested a redesign for renfe.es, übercrappy and ultrabuggy website for the Spanish railroad company. This is his proposal:
Spanish online newspapers seem to be clueless when it comes to designing their homepages. Their strategy seems to be “put everything on the homepage, no matter how”. No order, no sequence, no freakin’ idea about reading patterns. I’m not making this up, check these screenshots, they speak for themselves:
These structures bleed consensus and politics from every pixel. I’ve been in a couple of these projects and I understand the politics behind a newspaper redesign. All the “we cannot harm our current readers” and “we need to find a spot for this and that” only leads to having the same again and again.
And the constant increase of screen resolution is not helping but increasing the damage. Remember when most newspapers went from 800×600 to 1024? Instead of using those extra pixels to make everything bigger and give some white space they came up with an extra column for junk.
Much has been said about how to renew online journalism. If they just started by questioning these obsolete structures… Jeez… I am so looking for the day when a big exec has the guts to get rid of commitees, consensus and departmental presence to make something different, some design where you see a strategy, a point, a purpose.
A few months ago I wrote an article expressing my displeasure with American Airlines‘ hideous online presence. I also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To my surprise, a user experience designer at AA.com emailed me an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations. You should read my original article here and the response from Mr. X here.
An hour after I posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.
Juan Leal is on a travel trip in Helsinki. He is using his blog to document his observations and meetings with interesting people in the interaction design field. That is what he calls Helsingfors Series, definitely worth reading.
We’ve been working with minube’s team for two years, and now we’ve had the chance to redesign their homepage.
Minube.com is a traveller community where everyone shares their experiences, photos and videos. So you can plan a trip based on the experience of travellers along with minube’s flight and hotel search engine.
We’ve used a modular design that uses the entire width. Modules are easily interchangable, so adaptations can be done by adding, removing, and reordering whatever you want. Modules are also very comfortable to read on an iphone.
The users’ expriences of minube have been given prominence on the first shadowed module, which includes the destination search and all the relevant stats (users, experiences, photos and places). Minube is now pretty much self-explanatory, with a glance you know what is it about.
The new homepage is not only clean and lightweight on the visuals: thanks to minube’s stellar programming team, it’s now lightning-speed fast, loading in 1.2 seconds using our homebrewed tests. A very significant improvement over the 4 seconds of the previous version.
Our favourite detail is the realtime display of travellers’ experiences. we wanted to display a thriving community with user participation on the homepage.
Raúl (CEO of minube) has a great post on the redesign and evolution of their hompage.
Lasers are awesome, we all know that. But what happens when Daito Manabe puts some AI and some interactive capabilities into one? It gets überawesome. Check it out:
Now pray for this to be sold in stores before Xmass.
Two weeks ago Google launched Favorite Places: famous people from several cities around the world share their favorite spots on Google Maps. Check this video to see what’s all about:
We, Vostok, were hired by Google to help them design the interface that allows you to browse betweeen cities, celebrities and their favorite places:
Have you ever wondered who designs those cool (and sometimes impossible) user interfaces that appear in sci-fi movies. Well, it’s companies like OOOii.
They designed the exhausting multi-touch interface for Minority Report and more recently the intensive data panels at the last Star Trek movie. There is a very interesting interview to the guys in charge at the Flash Blog (Adobe). Yes, they do almost everything in Flash :)
I wonder how the specs are decided:
realistic vs. futuristic
intuitive vs. cryptic (hacker-style command line)
resemble something existing vs. completely innovative
real data (from the movie) vs. fake content (and data in small type so nobody can read it)
user executes commands vs. user dialogues with an artificial entity (HAL)
…
How many movies do you recall where interesting user interfaces appear? Would you help me make a list (and then make a collaborative post out of it)? Ok, here I go with the first that come to my mind:
We recently redesigned floresfrescas.com, probably the most ambitious project designed and developed at Vostok. It was not only the front store but all of the internal applications: inventory management, courier interfaces and backoffice stuff behind such a business. We could say we rebuilt the whole enchilada. Huge project.
floresfrescas.com is a place to buy nice & fresh flowers in Spain for half the price you would pay at any interflora kiosk. The concept is simple: they carry only three products (roses, multi-flower, and flower of the week bouquets).
We are extremely proud of our work. There are many tiny details in which we put so much care both in design and programming:
The heading color for the flower of the week changes according to the color of the flower (María spent days on this).
The muted color palette was designed to allow the freshness and vivacity
of the flowers really shine.
Texts are clear and friendly, especially confirmation messages.
Calendars. They rock. You can change delivery dates after your order has been placed. That is done in a really awesome manner, thanks to Sam’s code-wizardy.
All your account info and configuration is in a single page.
The homepage is clear and the structure is very flat, you can access
pretty much any page from there.
We also redesigned all the Corporate Identity (taking good care of making the brand web-centric instead of logo-centric).
Just as a reference, this is a screenshot of the old website:
The visual difference is outstanding, but we are also very proud of being able to narrow down a 12+ step checkout process into a couple of screens, without overloading the customer with endless error-prone forms.
We hope you like it and (here comes the shameless plug) if you, or one of your loved ones is in Peninsular Spain, try it out!
Minube, a Spanish and French online website where travellers share info about travel destinations, just released their printable traveller guides, which are basically travel guides with user comments, pictures and maps from the place you chose based on your selected categories, tags, etc.
We, Vostok, helped minube designing the creation and personalisation process which you can see on this post at the Minube blog (Spanish).
