Everyone else is doing it, but I’ve only got the one. Well, one and a wish.
In 2011 websites will become more produced. By ‘produced’ I mean something like ‘using time based effects to engage the user’.
Two powerful and extreme examples of this trend are:
If you’re not amazed and entertained by the first and moved by the later, then you’re a cold hearted cynic. Both these websites show how strong the effects of using time based effects to engage the user can be.
http://dockr.co.uk is a little web app to find your nearest docking stations for the recently launched London Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.
There’s been a bit of a rush to build apps for the scheme and so I thought I’d have a go and see what happens. It was a challenge combining stuff that interests me: making websites, mobile web, geolocation, bikes and London. So on Tuesday morning I set about building an app and at about 1.3oam on Wednesday I launched Dockr.co.uk.
There’s a recent trend that’s started really bugging me. Infographics. Not all infographics: I love websites like Infosthetics.com that show case some inspiring and beautiful ways of visually presenting data. What I’m hating is cheap blog infographics like this example on Mashable. It’s a time line; is the best way to present a list of events on the web a 700kb image? Really? There have been web development wars over using tables for layout vs nice clean semantic HTML and we’re now using fucking images to store information? Stop it. Now. It’s not big, it’s not clever, accessible, indexable or anything but shit. Calling it an infographic does not make it OK to through all web standards out the window. The web design and development community needs to make it clear that this is not acceptable.
This is an update on my project to style WYSIWYG interfaces to help the users get an understanding of the HTML they are creating. Read the original post here.
First of all, here’s the new demo page.
One of the big problems with most web based WYSIWYG text editors is that standard editor interfaces don’t provide any feedback about the horrors going on underneath the surface. WYSIWYG editors are often blamed for producing crappy HTML. However I think they generally do a decent job, it’s the users that screw things up by copying and pasting from Word or other web pages and generally doing the sort of unexpected things people do. But that’s not really the user’s fault; we can’t expect most users to know HTML or care if an H3 element is illegally nested in a P element. What we can do is create a nicer user interface that gives them more feedback on what they are creating.