This week the #MozNewsLab launched with two guest speakers. Their topics and discussions were quite different, but the major takeaway for me was to rethink design. Design is a major weakness for my personal projects (code first, aesthetics later, if ever) so I focused on the design processes shared by Mozilla's Aza Razkin and Storify's Burt Herman.
The first surprise for me was that both of their designs began with a radical new interface, then iterated toward more reliable and user-friendly interfaces. I was used to hearing an opposite strategy of using designs that are familiar first, than iterating to bring in your new ideas. That's the general idea behind the UI in a community mapping project I worked on, olpcMAP.net. There are some advanced features but they're neither essential to using the site nor highly visible. I'd like to have a chance to make a brand new UI like the flying windows and tags from one of Aza's examples, a design that's completely different and makes no apologies about it.
In the case of Storify, it's clear to see why a new interface was important in a functional way. Their goal was to reach a new audience for whom the old interface, the typical pattern, wasn't working. They take the streaming Twitter widget, with its minimalist, faster-than-thought feed that web users have gotten familiar with, and lets journalists and regular folks curate it. When the Tweet below became national news, a great deal of people had no idea how to parse it as a conversation:
With additional design and context, a deeply-integrated Tweet, with RTs, @s, and #s, can appear in a news article without taking readers out of the story.
Storify's talk also touched on the strategy behind a startup, the most interesting point being comments about choosing a team of co-founders. Getting the right people is your classic bank heist movie -finding the people with the right skills, getting them to work together. It's a mistake to believe these people have to have the same mindset or background. A company with one person or idea determining all of the code, design, and user support is like a country with one person as judge, jury, and executioner. There's centralized control of the project but the result will be a brutal, totalitarian design.
I'm looking forward to Friday's class with a visual designer from the New York Times. Finally maps and charts, some familiar territory for me! I'll try not to mention their Bahrain map which I used in an example for a P2PU course.
The first surprise for me was that both of their designs began with a radical new interface, then iterated toward more reliable and user-friendly interfaces. I was used to hearing an opposite strategy of using designs that are familiar first, than iterating to bring in your new ideas. That's the general idea behind the UI in a community mapping project I worked on, olpcMAP.net. There are some advanced features but they're neither essential to using the site nor highly visible. I'd like to have a chance to make a brand new UI like the flying windows and tags from one of Aza's examples, a design that's completely different and makes no apologies about it.
In the case of Storify, it's clear to see why a new interface was important in a functional way. Their goal was to reach a new audience for whom the old interface, the typical pattern, wasn't working. They take the streaming Twitter widget, with its minimalist, faster-than-thought feed that web users have gotten familiar with, and lets journalists and regular folks curate it. When the Tweet below became national news, a great deal of people had no idea how to parse it as a conversation:
With additional design and context, a deeply-integrated Tweet, with RTs, @s, and #s, can appear in a news article without taking readers out of the story.
Storify's talk also touched on the strategy behind a startup, the most interesting point being comments about choosing a team of co-founders. Getting the right people is your classic bank heist movie -finding the people with the right skills, getting them to work together. It's a mistake to believe these people have to have the same mindset or background. A company with one person or idea determining all of the code, design, and user support is like a country with one person as judge, jury, and executioner. There's centralized control of the project but the result will be a brutal, totalitarian design.
I'm looking forward to Friday's class with a visual designer from the New York Times. Finally maps and charts, some familiar territory for me! I'll try not to mention their Bahrain map which I used in an example for a P2PU course.
