Building Designers

Elevation

2009-04-25T00:20:00.001-07:00

In this age every thing is going to climax in it's field. In architechtural field there are many architechture in the world who designed a fabulous kind of buildings and houses.

In this pictur i want to show a beautiful front elevation of a house and u can see its realy wonderful and looking very beautiful and also showing the mind of an architechture.

Usability doesn't have to be ugly

2009-04-12T06:20:00.001-07:00

There is a balance that needs to be struck between a website that is truly functional and one that is elegant and stylish.

In an ideal world, the function and usefulness of a particular website or product should be married to its sense of style and beauty. This is not easy to achieve.

I’ve just bought a Dell X1 laptop. The reason I bought it is because it’s small and light. It does all the things I want from a laptop, and it’s stylish. It feels good to use. Previously, I had bought two IBM X31s, which I also very much liked. However, when I went back to the ThinkPad website, I found it so confusing I left in frustration.

When my new X1 hibernates, the green power light slowly goes on and off, as if it’s sleeping and thus breathing softly. I believe this is an innovation that Apple introduced some years ago. This is a simple thing but it’s nice.

Of course, Apple knows a lot about style and simplicity. They have generally made elegant products that are useful and easy to understand. That’s a pretty rare combination I have found.

It seems that function and style operate in two different parts of the brain. It’s unusual to find someone who can make something both useful and elegant. I have come across websites that are functional but ugly. The designers of these websites don’t see the point in tidying things up and making them look stylish. In fact, there can be a disdain for making things pretty.

I remember once reading an article in Wired Magazine about an Italian clothes house that wanted to dress up some Silicon Valley geeks. The geeks seemed to pride themselves on their lack of style, and were amused at the idea of Italian style.

Visual designers would embrace Italian style. They care very much about how they look, and about how the products they create look. They are as concerned about the type of font as the type of language.

Personally, language is my thing. I am somewhat obsessive about words. If you combine them properly you can achieve something very powerful. One word removed or added can make a huge difference to the meaning and elegance of a sentence.

The rise in interest in usability in recent years is resented by many visual designers because it lacks grace. In their opinion, it is obsessed with the nuts and bolts of things and doesn’t understand the emotional and aesthetic aspects of design.

There are certainly many highly usable websites that are not very pleasing on the eye. I think this is partly due to the fact that the Web is still young, and that we are still working on getting the nuts and bolts to work well.

It is also due to the fact that the Web is a highly functional space. Therefore, usefulness drives success more than any other factor. However, there is always room for style and grace. That which has substance can also have elegance.

Source : http://www.gerrymcgovern.com

Ryanair success has strong web lessons

2009-04-12T06:19:00.000-07:00

Despite record fuel prices, Ryanair makes record profits. Its no-frills website has helped this no-frills airline achieve such phenomenal success.

It’s good to know that, all over the world, human beings have something special in common in relation to their web behavior. Having traveled to 35 countries in the last five years, I was heartened by the common traits that we share. Whether in Asia, Europe or America, there is much that binds us together.

In fact, there is one web behavior attribute that I have found to be universal. It is that when people are on the Web they are cheap. Why, even the Swiss are cheap.

There is an important lesson to learn here. It applies to you, even though you’re managing a government or university website. It applies to you even though you’re managing an intranet.

What do people want most from government websites? Free stuff: benefits and grants. What do people want from intranets? Free stuff: employee offers, special discounts, cheap shares.

Ryanair.com will never ever win a design award from a prestigious institution focused on pushing the boundaries of interactive design. In fact, Ryanair.com is an affront to good design. It has two pieces of blinking text on its homepage, with each piece saying the exact same thing: BOOK NOW!

Ryanair.com floods its homepage with garish yellow, red and green. Its motto is “Fly Cheaper” and its lead story says: “2 million seats FREE”. Beside that is an ad for “Cheap Hotels”. It’s downright ugly. There should be a law against it.

Few people I meet like to admit that they fly Ryanair. And yet 35 million passengers will fly Ryanair in 2005, with the number expected to be 70 million by 2012.

Herein lies another important lesson. People lie. What they’re telling you in that survey you just did; it’s not true. People are cheap and selfish on the Web; they just don’t like admitting it. When staff get on your intranet, they could care less about collaborating and reading policy documents. What they want is to see what they can get for themselves; how they can move their own career forward.

Of course, people are much more than cheap, selfish and ambitious. However, you’ve got to meet their basic needs first. You’ve got to be upfront, clear, precise, to-the-point, cheap.

A prospective student wants a prestigious, well recognized degree from a top ranking university, and they want to know what that will cost them. Try getting these basic facts from many university websites. Not easy.

Observe human nature. Get out and talk to people, but watch out to read between the lines of what they are saying to you. There is no greater skill a web manager can develop than a gut instinct for what your customer really needs.

Gut instinct is something you develop by a process of constant repetition, of constant observation. The Web is a simple place, really. Ryanair sells cheap flights, Amazon.com discounts; Skype gives free phone calls, and eBay is the world’s largest yard sale. Get to know what your customer needs. Get to know what they really care about.

Source : http://www.gerrymcgovern.com

Find out what your customers really need from your website

2009-04-12T06:18:00.000-07:00

Find out what your customers really need from your website

If there is one reason—more than any other—why a website fails, it is because it doesn’t understand its customers.

Thanks to everyone who recently completed the survey of web manager headings. Out of 50 headings, the number-one heading, with 17 percent of people voting for it, was:

“Find out what your customer really needs from your website”

Stating the obvious? If the obvious was obvious, everyone would be doing it. We live in a world of mirrors and opposites. What is clear is not clear, what is obvious is not obvious.

The Web is self-service. That means you need to know your customers much better—on a much deeper and comprehensive level—than if you were dealing with them face-to-face. When two people are in a room together, more than words are being communicated. When someone is on your website, you can’t hear them scream.

Last week I received an email from a reader who told me about what happened to a colleague of hers when she tried to download some photos from the US Department of Energy website.

Fasten your seats belts of incredulity. All that I’m about to tell you is true. (I went through the process myself, and crazily, unbelievably, extraordinarily, and all that, it happened just as you’re about to read.)

If you want to download images from the Department of Energy website, you must create an account. As part of this process, you must enter a password, which you are informed is “case-sensitive”.

Knowing this, the person entered in her password in lowercase. After clicking Sign Up, the following message came back:

"The password must contain at least one uppercase letter."

“Thanks for telling me,” she says out loud to her monitor. She edits her password to include an uppercase letter and clicks Sign Up.

A message comes back: "The password must contain at least one numeric digit."

“Are you kidding me!?” she says in a raised voiced. She adds a number (one presumes a “numeric digit” is a number) to the password.

"The password must contain at least one special character (such as !, @, #, etc.)."

The person has never had as much fun entering in her password details. She joyfully adds a special character at the end of her password.

A new message comes back: "The password must contain at least one special character within the first seven positions".

She moves the special character closer to the beginning of the password, leaving a number at the end.

A message comes back: "The password must end with a non-numeric character."

Whoever created this trial-by-password is I’m sure not someone who enjoys developing techniques in cruel and unusual punishment. They’re just doing their job, and completely forgetting that real, living, breathing, laughing, screaming people have to fill out these passwords.

Find out what your customer really needs from your website by putting yourself in their shoes. Never ever design a website without thoroughly testing it with your target customers. Every day—every single day—you should be thinking about, talking to, listening to, observing your customers. There is simply no other part of your job that is remotely as important.

Source : http://www.gerrymcgovern.com

Nino Doll: great web design and a great cause

2009-04-12T06:17:00.000-07:00

It’s always refreshing to come across a website that communicates its purpose clearly and concisely. Ninodoll.org does that.

When you arrive at the homepage of Ninodoll.org, you read the following:

12,000 Sri Lankan Children were killed in the 26.12.04 Tsunami
12,000 Nino Dolls have been commissioned to commemorate them
12,000 Passports to Education will be funded by sales of the Doll
Enter our site to buy a Nino Doll now!

The booking process is simple and straightforward. The whole site has this leanness and sense of clear purpose. Aside from the fact that this is a great cause, this is a great website.

There has never been a clearer need to get to the core of the matter than today. Management is increasingly becoming a discipline of what not to do, what to take out, what not to present, what not to offer.

People tell me that they have very complex organizations. The customer doesn’t care. The complexity of your organization is not your customer’s problem. It’s yours. That’s the challenge of management. That’s what leadership demands, and you must be a leader if you want to have a successful website.

If you try to please everybody you serve nobody, and ultimately you fail. If a department or group gets onto your homepage because of political clout, you fail. If you are not making tough decisions, not stripping away the deadwood on your site, you’re not doing your job properly.

It’s not easy to be a web manager today. That’s because it’s a very challenging job, with huge potential rewards if it’s done right. If you make a stand for quality and simplicity and relentless customer focus, you walk the right road. You lay the foundations for a great career, because let me tell you this, the professional web manager is going to be in huge demand.

Simplicity can be deceptive. Ninodoll.org could have created a very cluttered website. It took good management to focus on the essentials and create a clear call to action for the visitor.

Don’t bring your organizational complexity onto your website. Look at Google. What do you see on the Google homepage? A very big search box. And is this all that Google offers? Of course not.

Here’s what else Google offers: Alerts, Local, Answers, Maps, Blog Search, Mobile, Book Search, News, Catalogs, Scholar, Directory, SMS, Froogle, Special Searches, Groups, University Search, Images, Labs, Web Search Features, Blogger, Picasa, Code, Talk, Desktop, Toolbar, Earth, Translate, Gmail.

You can’t administer a website; you have to manage it. If Google administered its website, then every time it released a new tool or service, it would add it to its homepage.

If you don’t have genuine management authority for your website today, you must carefully build the business case for why you should be given that authority. If you let your website grow wild, you destroy rather than create value. That’s not good for your organization, and it is certainly not good for your career.

What’s the hard core of what your organization can offer on your website? Relentlessly strip away the clutter. The Web rewards those who do a little well—and become known for what they do well—rather than a lot poorly.

Source : www.gerrymcgovern.com

Information architecture versus graphic design

2009-04-12T06:16:00.001-07:00

Much web design has suffered from an over reliance on graphic design principles. Too many graphic designers have tried to force the Web to be what it is not, in the process creating ineffective and sometimes unusable websites. Quality web design is driven by information architecture design principles. Graphic design should support these principles.

The Web requires an information architecture design rather than a graphic design approach because:

The Web is a literate rather than a visual medium. That is to say that words, and not images, are the building blocks for the vast majority of websites. Commercial graphic design focuses on grabbing the consumer's attention through the use of strong visual images, and short emotive phrases. Graphic design is concerned with how a page looks. Information architecture design is concerned with how a page reads.
The Web is an active rather than a passive medium. We are constantly making decisions such as to search for a particular term, to click on a particular link, etc. information architecture design is concerned with supporting such decisions through search and navigation processes.
The Web is a visually constrained environment. Computer screen size and resolution, combined with download issues, mean that visual experiences are poor on the Web. Certainly, in comparison to a glossy magazine or a large TV screen, the Web cannot compete from a visual communication point of view.
The Web is accessed through computers. By their very nature computers are functional, work-oriented tools. You sit upright, close to a screen. Most people buy computers for two principal reasons. Firstly, to work. Secondly, to educate themselves or their children.
The Web is a time sensitive environment. There is one word to describe the average person who uses the Web: impatient. People don't like being kept waiting on the Web.
The very architecture of the Web is about linking pieces of content. Effective web design is about organizing and classifying content so that it can be easily found and read, listened to or viewed.
AOL, Ebay, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, CNN, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Napster and Cisco, are just some examples of organizations that take an information rather than graphic design approach to web design.

In response to my last column, many people were upset that I should describe the Web as a library. But it is a library. It's a library of books, ideas, music, art, cars, houses, government legislation, technology news, computer software and hardware. Unfortunately, the Web is a library that very often has the books on the floor and the lights turned out. information architecture design is about turning the lights on and putting the 'books' in their proper place.

I'd like to finish with a quote. It's from one of the most extensive surveys of public opinion on the Internet, which was published by the Markle Foundation in the summer of 2001:

“By far the leading metaphor for the Internet in the public’s mind is not 'a shopping mall' or 'banking and investment office,' but rather 'a library.' Despite the popular depiction of the Internet as a channel for commerce, the public mostly views it as a source of information, and these uses appear to explain its popularity much more than its utility as a way to shop, bank, or invest.”

Let's give the public what they want.

Source : http://www.gerrymcgovern.com

Managing Risk with Design

2009-04-12T06:08:00.000-07:00

Among the ways to manage risk, two methods will be of interest to user experience designers:

Signaling is where participants in a transaction communicate something meaningful about themselves.
Reducing information costs involves reducing the time and effort it takes participants in a transaction to get meaningful information (such as: is this a good price? is this a quality good?).

Reputation systems tend to enable signaling and are best utilized in evaluating people’s historical actions. In contrast, rating systems are a way of leveraging user feedback to reduce information costs and are best utilized in evaluating standard products or services.

It is important to note that reputation systems are not the only way to signal (branding and media coverage are other means, among others), and rating systems are not the only means of reducing information costs (better search engines and product reviews also help, for example). But these two tools are becoming increasingly important, as they provide quick reference points that capture useful data.

As we review various aspects of rating and reputation systems, the key questions to keep in mind are:

Who is doing the rating?
What, exactly, is being rated?
If people are being rated, what behaviors are we trying to encourage or discourage?

Who is doing the Rating?

A random poll of several friends shows about half use the Amazon rating system when buying books and the other half ignore it. Why do they ignore it? Because they don’t know whether the people doing the rating are crackpots or if they have similar tastes to them.

Amazon has tried to counteract some of these issues by using features such as “Real Name” and “helpfulness” ratings of the ratings themselves .

Source : http://www.boxesandarrows.com