Web Design | David Lee King

Just read/skimmed Joshua Porter’s book, Designing for the Social Web (Voices That Matter). In all, it’s a good book that has lots of great ideas for building social sites. The book focuses first on defining what the social web is, and then spends the rest of the book discussing design and interface problems for the social web, and how to fix those things.

One idea I wanted to share (and to remember for my own future use) is this, from page 34:

“So how do you avoid feature creep when creating and adding features? Start with your objects, your nouns. Observe all the actions people do with/perform on those objects, and those are possible features for your application.”

So, for example, a list of nouns or objects might be Videos, Articles, Photos, and Books. The Verbs, or actions, for Articles include things like this: read, archive for later, quote, link to, share, comment on, annotate, etc.

Cool idea! So – when building a new website or web app, this is a great way to figure out what it should do, and what features it should have (and what features people will potentially ask for, too).

pic by Ben Dodson

Speaker: Paul Annett, Clearleft

Started off talking abut the arrow within the “Ex” of the FedEx logo and other hidden things within logos, fences, etc.

Innocent Smoothies (a juice company in England) – there’s a different message on the bottoms of some of their cartons. One says “stop looking at my bottom.”

Can do this in web design too – type about:mozilla into your firefox browser, into each version, and you get an unfolding story from a fake book about Mozilla…

… giving a live example … with audience participation, props, and a guy dressed in a gorilla suit

Showing fun ways to use css and backgrounds – when you resize the screen (twequency as example) clouds go by. Nice

Ho ho ho hat in flickr – users loved it!

Google Moon – if you zoomed in all the way, you saw cartoon cheese

They have planted “easter eggs” in websites – you have to find them, they’re sorta pointless (other than making people smile)

Transparency in web design – making things that aren’t white, but are transparent. Can be cleverly used

David Emery – his website does interesting things..

Kano Model of customer satisfaction: lots of this type of “customer delight” stuff fits in his model

Basic needs – with a hotel room, you’ll be mad if there’s no toilet paper, but lots of rolls don’t delight you. On the web, having a page that just works is a basic need

Creatives and designers work on fulfilling excitement needs