The Cosmonauts

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:

The images correspond to El País, El Mundo and ABC.

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.

Dustin Curtis at The Incompetence of American Airlines & the Fate of Mr. X

(Thanks Bastian)

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.

Nearness explores interacting without touching.
With RFID it’s proximity that matters and physical contact isn’t necessary.

(thanks mort)

Looks like there is a secret sort of constellatory message inside Apple Snow Leopard:

(seen at the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs)

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:

• Minority Report (multitouch)
• Red Planet (augmented reality devices)
• Star Trek (intensive data displays)
• 2001 (HAL, natural language interaction)

More?

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).
• The 404: Page Not Found rocks

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).

Ah, here’s an example of what a guide looks like (pdf). Pretty awesome. Congrats to the minube guys!

I bet there was a lot of collaboration and team involvement in the design of the Microsoft remote.

Lately I have seen what I consider a trend among design consultancies. Many of them jump in the wagon of selling their process (the “how”) and not their result (the “what”). The keywords could go like this:

Design strategy, post-it notes, ethnography, cocreation, design thinking, iteration, methodology, big boards, flowcharts, innovation, moodcharts, multidisciplinary, cardboard prototyping, deliverables, ideas, process.

instead of…

Portfolio. Results. Ratios. Agile. Deliver. Design. Product.

Sounds to me like a late echo of what we used to hear from IDEO back in the late nineties. It was amazing to most of us: new and interesting methodologies for designing smart products. You could be a sociologist and end up designing cool sunglasses or high-tech medical equipment. What a promise… huh? Apparently many design consultancies (and I say “consultancies” with a bit of sarcasm) kept the methodology part but forgot about the delivery/product part.

I am not saying that methodology, etnography and all that doesn´t matter. It does. We do so at Vostok (sometimes, only if necessary). What I am trying to say is that it’s the result that matters, not the methods, not the concepts. It’s the product of your work, not the work itself. Show me what you’ve done, not how you do it.

All the crafty wadus-wadus is cool, the fancy videos, the whiteboards, the multidisciplinary meetings in rooms with pencils, paper and all… But that doesn’t make you a designer. It’s the product that makes you a designer. And if the result is good (both for client and user) who cares about how you got there… It’s not what you say what matters, not what you blog or what you tweet, not what you report or what you put on a 99 slide powerpoint. It’s what you do, what you finally create what matters.

We all agree at the office: Bing does awesome at video search, especially for porn. Go check it and then move the cursor over the thumbnails, change the prefered length of the videos, screen resolution…

Awesome!

OMG, this is so exciting!

Tuenti, the leading social network in Spain just semi-released a new version and we, Vostok, collaborated with their design team assessing in usability and interaction design matters. It’s not like we are happy about it, it’s more like we are overflowing with pride.

Tuenti is one of the three most used websites in Spain together with Google and perhaps some online newspaper. Astronomic numbers on usage time, milions of active users and an indecent number of pictures uploaded everyday. It’s the drug our youngsters consume every day in Spain.

The project has not concluded yet and some changes are still to come. Usability testing, user feedback and tons of data help the team make the final adjustments before they release the new version to all users.

The new design includes a few new functionalities, improves legibility and makes easier to do the most common tasks (messaging, uploading pics, creating events…). Most of these changes are hard to see at a glance, they are subtle. They need to be used and *felt*. You know, it’s not just about how it looks but about how it behaves.

Approach A

A lot of designers want to increase the line height or padding in order to make the interface “breathe.” We deliberately don’t do that. We want to squeeze in as much information as possible above the fold. We recognize that information density is part of what makes the experience great and efficient. Our goal is to get users in and out really quickly. All our design decisions are based on that strategy.

Irene Au, User Interface Director at Google

Approach B

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions.

Douglas Bowman, Former Head of Visual Design at Google

Which one would you take?

(thanks, Missha)

This collection of all the Apple.com hompages is an amazing lesson on how to use color, space, type, photography and -what’s even more important- how to focus on what matters when designing a website. Worth spending an hour on it:

Fucking thing is supposed to make all your other shit “interactive” or something:

It’s great to see how twitter looked like back in 2006 and realise that it’s pretty much the same as now, except for some improvements (avatars and little more):

(via a tweet from Seisdeagosto)

Adding stuff is a temptation in which many fall. We’ve seen it in a lot of projects. The owner thinks that the only possible evolution is adding functionality. We think that sometimes is just the opposite: make it better by removing instead of adding. The key is to know which branches to cut, just like a good gardener does, so the tree grows stronger and healthier.

Twitter could allow users to upload pictues, sounds… it could have a rich text editor so people can put smileys, html and italics… But it doesn’t have all that. It still is 140 character messages ordered chronologically in one column. Nothing else.