Whitney Museum's new website
I was reading one of blog articles by Mark Hurst at Good Experience, and found that the Whitney Museum has recently launched a new website. I love the fact that they put the “Visit” section prominently on the landing page. They made this section AJAX-based (like Google’s Gmail) that allows dynamic interaction, so visitors can get information without reloading a page or jumping to another page. It’s great.
One issue, which I think is so critical, is the choice of white text on black background. Is Whitney a funeral company? The landing page looks acceptable, because there are more images than text. But when I go to “Get Involved” page, for example, the black and white contrast kills my eyes and takes over my attention that I cannot focus on anything else. I hope the website’s color palette is a temporary experiment or something specific to one of exhibitions. I will come back to the site in a month or so to see if they changed the color.
I’ve been designing a mock up UI(user interface) for a browser-based app for iPhone for the past few days as part of my final projects at ITP. I’ve pretty much ruined my sketchbook for drawing a bunch of layout and wireframes. I found several interesting resources for designing iPhone specific UIs. Whether I use them or not, I decided to post here for future reference.
For those who are too lazy to draw buttons and lines…there’s an “iPhone Stencil Kit” for $17.95!
iPhone Stencil Kit sample picture
Of course, there’s a sweet Photoshop GUI, which I’m using right now.
iPhone GUI, Photoshop file
If you need a conceptual stuff, there’s an essay by John Gruber about how to make your UI “iPhone-like”.
And lastly, if you’re talking about information design there’s no way you can ignore Edward Tufte. Here’s his video talking about the user experience on iPhone.
When you are developing a website or a blog, browser testing becomes critical to make sure visitors get what’s supposed to be on the screen. You should at least test your site on IE and Firefox. It is probably the best if you analyze the traffic to your website and figure what browsers are mainly used by the visitors.
There are many ways to accomplish the browser testing including getting actual PCs and Macs to run every browser, or installing virtual PC on your Mac. This morning I stumbled upon a blog that has a list of convenient services you can use for browser testing. I find following three services particularly useful if you just need a quick font check or layout testing. The downside of these services, however, is that you cannot debug on the fly with FireBug or Microsoft Script Editor.
Adobe Browser Labs: Registration required, You can choose different browser sets.
Adobe Browser Lab
View Like Us: A simple AJAX-based site that adjust the size of the window to the specific browser. It offers iPhone and Wii browser testing.
ViewLike.Us
NetRender: Internet Explorer specific.
NetRender
I stumbled on an article about “slow news”. Proposed by Dan Gillmor, a technology writer, the slow news is a concept to “think before believe” rapid-fire news. A recent example is a balloon-boy news, in which media made a great fuss about a missing boy in the sky that turned out to be a hoax. The idea of slow news reminded me of Dick Pender in “Whole Truth” by David Baldacci (one of my favorite authors). Pender is a perception management consultant and an “image maker” who creates news to make public believe anything. He does whatever it costs to make the news believable. He could exist for real. If we cannot believe news, whom are we to trust what is really happening in the world?
Original artice: “Slow News: designing reflection and contemplation into the news-cycle“