News & Notes

Improving a design means making changes.  I’m not sure why people are surprised that Facebook makes changes to their design.  If they didn’t, they’d stagnate and eventually go out of business. My question is whether design changes are being made to improve usability for the users or in order to make room for new lines of revenue.  Both are important to a business, but hopefully the user’s best interest are top of mind.

Brian has been iteratively redesigning his blog/website for the past few months – trying something out and then taking a look at the data to see how it’s working.  His current design is very clean (and I have a todo list to clean up my own) – very usable (and maybe a slight bit boring).

I think usability is very important to design – but it needs to also be balanced with what looks good.  What the eye finds appealing isn’t always the same as what is easiest to use, but eye appeal has a lot to do with how we “feel” about a site and that can play a powerful part in reuse/repurchase/revisit/etc.  In Brian’s blog, I really like his layout on his portfolio page – because the images on the right really look nice with the text on the left.  On the other pages, the text doesn’t feel like it takes up enough of the page (although I wouldn’t want it to take up the whole thing either) – and the small width means more scrolling for reading.  That said, this is a great experiment, I’ve learned some things from Brian’s findings and I applaud Brian for working towards improved usability.