September 19, 2005
Information Design Watch
From Dynamic Diagrams
Consultants in Visual Logic
In This Issue:
INFORMATION DESIGN
- Talking Value
- Shop or Study: Yahoo Gives You the Choice
IMPLEMENTATION
- Gap Tries to Solve the "Too Many Clicks" Problem
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
- Matt DeMeis Rejoins Dynamic Diagrams as a Senior Visual Designer
INFORMATION DESIGN
Talking Value
Gerry McGovern offers a reminder that Internet projects need to be presented and defended in business terms:
"Many web teams I come across are fascinated by technology. They are fascinated by usability, personas, metadata, classification, search, navigation, layout. Some of them are even fascinated by content. These are not things that senior managers are remotely interested in."
What senior managers are interested in is value:
"How does your intranet reduce costs and increase revenue? How does your university website bring in more and better students? How does your government website increase the revenue and reduce the expenses of your nation by saving the time citizens spend interacting with government?"
Shop or Study: Yahoo Gives You the Choice
The Mindset Yahoo search (beta) adds a simple way to filter search results. Once you run a search, an interactive "slider" allows you to focus results more on "shopping" or "researching". This binary choice actually turns out to be quite effective at sorting typical results. It does raise the interesting question about whether other such pairs of opposites could be as useful in particular contexts.
For a completely different use of dynamic sliders, see Amazon.com's Diamond Search. The fact that diamonds are graded by very specific qualities results in an excellent example of a faceted search:
IMPLEMENTATION
Gap Tries to Solve the "Too Many Clicks" Problem
Gap, Inc., has relaunched its Web sites (
Gap.com,
BananaRepublic.com, and
OldNavy.com) with a completely new, internally-built e-commerce system. Making extensive use of dynamic HTML, the new system is intended to help customers choose shirts, pants, and other items of apparel in a direct, intuitive way:
"Toby Lenk, president of Gap Inc. Direct, the company's corporate catalog and online division, said the mouse-overs and pop-up windows eliminated the need to bounce the shopper off her browsing path each time she needed information.
"'A lot of this was borrowing metaphors from the store experience,' Mr. Lenk said. 'When a woman walks into one of our stores, she can process things really quickly. Like when she's browsing the racks, she takes a quick look at what the sizes and colors are, picks up something and keeps going. We're trying to let her stay with the fashion.'"
Frankly, Gap's new system was neither smooth nor fast when we tried it out. The DHTML shortcuts occasionally failed to respond, and the interactivity lauded in the New York Times article turns the interface into a rollover minefield.
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
Matt DeMeis Rejoins Dynamic Diagrams as a Senior Visual Designer
Matt DeMeis has returned to Dynamic Diagrams as a Senior Visual Designer. Matt most recently worked for Ingenta as their lead interface designer. Prior to that, Matt worked for us, and it's great to welcome him back!
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