We Need to Start Thinking About Interface Design
One of the subjects that I often ignore when talking about social media is design. A couple of times I have glossed over the importance of the design of your page specifically when talking about the social networking site MySpace but have never really looked at the subject any more than that.
This semester I am taking a class called Interface Design that really examines how users approach applications and WebPages as well as how they should be designed. Going forward I am going to post once or twice a week and talk about what I am learning in this class and how it can be applied to social media and the design of your applications and WebPages. Too often design gets overlooked and even when people spend a significant amount of time on how something looks it isn’t always functional. In fact for most websites the design interface and navigation is the most complained about topic:
Hopefully these posts will help you understand proper interface design.
Today I am going to examine some of the topics of chapter 2 from the Jenifer Tidwell book, Designing Interfaces. In this chapter Tidwell examines how we organize content.
Information Architecture
When you are going to sit down and develop an application or a website one of the first things you need to think about is the information architecture or as Tidwell says, “dividing stuff up.” A lot of the time designers look at dividing the information up by either nouns or verbs. For example, you blog categories list is usually a list of nouns. While most applications use verbs, like most e-commerce sites, “buy, sell, browse or register”. Also you can take a mixed organizational approach to architecture but you need to make sure that you are laying out things clearly if you do this and make sure you don’t end up with a confusing mixture.
In social media one of the places that I see this misused are blog sites that also act as a front for ecommerce, especially people selling e-books from their blogs. There is usually a poor mixture of a list of object and a list of actions, making the overall navigation of the site confusing. I find it disorientating to go to a blog and have a set of expectations that the blog is going to function like other blogs but then have all these calls to action mixed in with a standard setup. It very rarely is done well.
Physical Structure
Rest of the chapter dealt with physical structure, for a lot of the applications that we are talking about the layouts discussed in here wouldn’t apply. However one of the layouts is something that I think gets overlooked a lot in social media, specifically blogs: having a layout that offers alternative views.
There are two alternate views that people don’t give a lot of thought to when they are designing their blogs: the print view and the view from a PDA. These are two ways that people will access your site and view your information. Not taking these into consideration decreases the functionality of your site.
For wordpress users this is an easy fix as there are multiple plug-ins available that will allow your site to be read properly by PDAs.
Alex King has one that you can find here.
As for a print there is a plug in that will help control how the printed page functions, you can find it here.
How much thought do you put into the design of your social media real estate?
Tags: blogs, Interface Design, Myspace, Social-MediaRelated Stories
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