Design

Yahoo! has been pushing their new mobile application, Yahoo! Go, for some time now. I decided to try it, since I use Yahoo! a lot for movie information, and the promise of a rich Flickr client was tempting as well.

However, after a few uses I realized that the WAP/mobile HTML site — accessible via wap.oa.yahoo.com — is still superior for me for the one thing I access Yahoo! the most for: Weather.

Just look for yourself.

wap.oa.yahoo.com

Yahoo! Go

The two screens represent the maximum amout of data I can get about the day’s weather from each system. That’s right: Strong Storms is all that I know when using Yahoo! Go. I don’t know that the winds could be damaging. I don’t know that those storms run through both day and night. In fact, I don’t know any differences between day and night forecasts. The simpler application has more useful data than the “more useful” application. Not to mention…

wap.oa.yahoo.com

Yahoo! Go

I’m not even getting my local forecast. I’m getting the conditions in from who-knows-where, probably Central Park, 7 miles away. Bizarre.

I remember that after prototyping a site targeted at 16-24 year old girls involved in social shopping, and showing them mockups with extra cool Google-like whitespace, they said, “Yuck. Too boring.” They wanted lots of colors and random stuff in the background.

Andrew’s stumbled across the design schism of today: Much of visual design has finally eked into great information design, but has also become extremely functional and has lost a great deal of real aesthetic charm. The majority of it now only appeals to interface designers and other visual designers. Just take a look at the web 2.0 parody tag on Flickr to see a sign of where we’ve bottomed out today.

We don’t have to design poorly, we just have to design for audiences. Too often we can get so wound up in the process itself that we begin to design for ourselves. So ugly design isn’t about wanting ugliness, but it is an active rejection of the sterile landscape of web design today.

BTW, Andrew: love the blog!

I just made the decision to buy the PEBL. I’d been eyeing it for a while as a great-looking but possibly-too-outdated-tech-wise phone, ranking it just below wanting the RAZR V3i (if T-Mobile were to carry it).

It wasn’t until Jason spoke up so loudly about it that it made me remember this is exactly what I was talking about earlier in the year: the PEBL wasn’t less tech, it was less “not-phone.” I’d preferred the RAZR for all the things I’d said I’d wanted to get away from (like its iTunes app) — it was time to look closer at the PEBL…and sure enough, I liked what I saw.

And judging by a few of the voices that followed, like Anil’s and David’s, it turns out this “Less Not-Phone” thing may just be a new trend. Viva simplification!

DigitalWeb ran a very nice article about better ROI through web standards. However, this is the part I really liked:

One complaint I hear when I recommend this is, “But the site will look different on different browsers!” My answer is always, “So what? How many users are using two different browsers at the same time and comparing what the site looks like in both of them?”

This is a point I’ve been making throughout my professional career—it’s simply not that important to make a site look exactly alike for every browser. In other words, now that standards and browsers have caught up to each other and are fairly mature in features in both regards, people are starting to get what the web has been about from the very beginning. That the value of hypertext is in speed, flexibility of display, compatibility and manipulation. Not in pixel-perfect renditions of print design.

Why blog? Why wiki? A while ago, Greg on Airbag called personal web design dead. And he’s right. An old post dug up on a thread on 43 Folders points some really remarkable insight on the subject:

The role of the new interface is to provide access to all information we record in a transparent manner. When you have 10-20 files you can name them all. If you have 10,000 pieces of information will you name them all?

We seek to organize memories like photographs, moving pictures and sounds.
We seek to organize our finances and our lives
We seek to analyze data
We do not seek to organize “files”

When the outcome drives the process we will only go to where we’ve already been. If process drives the outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.