In his article “The Meta Narrative, Designing Beautiful User Experiences” Josh discusses the meta-narrative in UX design. The meta-narrative is the story and experience that a website communicates to it’s users. The article gives a few pointers on what makes an interesting meta-narrative, for example: “The current design trend of employing varying magazine styled page layouts for blog posts is a true testament to the phenomenon of the “meta-narrative”. Every blog post tells a unique story; not only in terms of content but more importantly how a user can potentially engage with and decode the displayed information.”
Forget the fold – Users expect to scroll
“People tell us that they don’t mind scrolling and the behaviour we see in user testing backs that up. We see that people are more than comfortable scrolling long, long pages to find what they are looking for. A quick snoop around the web will show you successful brands that are not worrying about the fold either.”
CX Partners advice:
- Don’t cram everything above the fold. Use whitespace and imagery to encourage scrolling.
- Don’t use stark, horizontal lines as they discourage scrolling
- Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars – the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page
We’re off to Webstock!
We’re heading North for the summer. Two of our team members Tim Klein and Lexi Thorn will be heading to Webstock in Wellington 15-19th February 2010. “5 full-on days. 13 hands-on workshops. 20 kickass international speakers. 24 must-see presentations. Design, development, mobile, usability, content, community, open data, innovation & inspiration.”
Read the rest of this entry »
UI Design Patterns
Great article by Smashing Magazine on User Interface Design Patters. Store this one for reference.
Concept Models
When I attended IxDA in Savannah USA last year, one of the most interesting and relevant talks that I went to was that of Dan Brown of Eight Shapes who discussed Concept Models.