The 7 Deadly Sins of Digital

Go read this over at iain tait | crackunit.com and rember it next time you get asked to build a screensaver.

The Scroll

When designing pages designers very often come up against dealing with the scroll point of the page. That being the flexible point on the page beyond which placing content initiates the browsers inherent page scroll. This point however trivial it may seem initially presents a number of issues with which the design has to grapple. Firstly content placed below this point is never the first thing a user sees, secondly a vast majority of sites require length pages to be able to accommodate their content and thirdly, in user testing it becomes clear that user can sometimes miss any content below the scroll altogether.

Long pages are a fact of life as designer has to understand and accommodate. So how can we make sure these lengthy pages do their content justice? Firstly I’d argue that a lengthy homepage is more problematic than a lengthy content page. Users a generally in a scavenging mode on a homepage and are likely to be less concerned with the whole page than they are about quickly identifying something of relevance to their task and acting upon it. Content pages on the other hand find users in a more stable state and more led by the actually consumption of the content on the page than they are by the need to scavenge another more suitable location. So where the rules about keeping business critical functions above the scroll the importance of this factor is contextual.

So how as a designer to you exploration full exploration of your pages? A news article for instance can cope very well with this exploration. It’s very content is linear, it leads the user from the top to the bottom. If the user comes to the bottom of the screen they are conditioned to scroll the page. This fact becomes obvious when advertising is placed with articles. These provide an experience ‘break’ and publishers find themselves requiring notes on the page to the effect of: ‘Article Continues’. Homepages have less inherent characteristics that promote full exploration. In some cases the actual task of designing for ‘above the scroll’ creates an almost finished page with little visual clue that the page continues below the scroll. This by it’s very nature inhibits exploration: the user has been visually conditioned that the content ends and there is nothing more to see, when in actual fact there could be.

Think about how you could engage users to explore pages below the scroll. Try not to ‘finish’ the top portion of your pages and avoid creating a visual full stop before then end of the content. Provide content leaders that cross the scroll boundary to emphasise that content does indeed exist below the scroll. Users explore pages by seeking out items that hint to their preconceived next destination – make sure you give your users these hints


And here's a link for some more discussion on this...
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of

Agency Structures

I'm very interested in how an interactive agency should be structured and how the different roles and responsibilities should be assigned to best suit the both the business and the client.

The obvious answer to the question is that it related to the size of the agency and the type of work they undertake and for whom, but I’d like to explore beyond this simple answer and evaluate the traditional roles within agency structures.

How do flat organizations vary from tall organisations? How do roles sometimes merge and to what extent is that successful or unsuccessful?

To be continued…

What is an interactive designer

Can interactive designers be effective if they’ve never coded?

This question come up almost every time a recruitment drive hots up and depending on the candidates you see you come to a different conclusion.

The main question comes down to how you define what an interactive designs brings to a project and how they contribute to a wider interactive design team.

Designers that have never coded to generally have exceptionally crisp graphic design skills and generally have been educated on old school graphics communication degrees. Designers that have never coded at all occasionally carry along an attitude that coding is dirty and they’d never be interested in doing it.

However designers that have coded can sometimes be very immature with respect to typography and layout. They can produce great graphics and produce designs you know won’t have CSS/HTML developers tearing their hair out, but their designs can sometimes lack soul.

And here’s the moment you realise that if you very rarely get the best of both worlds but in actual fact need the best of both worlds.

Some of the best web designers have coded before. They certainly don’t see it as their main craft and might not still write but it’s there in the back of the minds. They also have huge respect for typography and layout but as a skill that sits between the two conflicting forces that have an extra ability to understand the user and the technology their designing for.

It’s this middle ground that I think marks out the very best interactive designers and it one that breeds from marriage of creative and technical backgrounds.

and some more on the open agency

http://www.openintelligenceagency.com/

Where is the agency?

This is a subject that I'm sure i'll be posting more about in the future. The primary question being – Is the traditional agency structure still relevant in a world that’s ever more connected but increasingly geographically independent?

There’s some interesting reading about this being posted at the moment.

http://www.adamcrowe.com/2007/06/30/the-agency-is-dead-long-live-the-agency/

More to come.

(Posted from South Africa while working for clients in London)

Inspired

Feeling like you need some input. you can accuse me of being completely off the ball, but i've only just encountered TED. I advise you to.
http://www.ted.com