Unique interface design
Gojee.com: Building a better cookbook
I came across Gojee.com today which is a new cooking site that just launched. It’s simple design isn’t revolutionary but if you look beneath the deceptively simple design you see it has a powerful and well thought out user experience.
The overall design direction borrows from so many photography sites we have all seen in recent years with full screen images that slowly scroll but almost betray some of innovative thinking hidden under the surface. But the real power of the site is in the main navigation which is simply made up of three fields – ‘I crave’, ‘I have’ and ‘I dislike’. ‘I crave’ which is an open suggestive search field where you can enter what you are in the mood for and it will return corresponding topics the site has content for. ‘I have’ lets your enter ingredients you have in your fridge and ‘I dislike’ lets you add foods you are allergic to or just don’t like to eat. When you look at these three fields individually they don’t seem very remarkable but when you look at them together you see they are really powerful. They combine an open search field that sets direction of the search while the other two fields are used as content filters to refine the search to the most relevant results. So you get a powerful and targeted search that combines search with filtering system all done through three deceptively simple navigation options.
Another really nice feature is hidden in the ‘I have” menu where you can link your grocery store rewards card to the site and it will automatically add your purchases to your “I have” list. Right now you can only do this with a D’Agostino card but since there is one right round the corner from I office I tried it out and it worked perfectly. You can see how more grocery stores will be trying to build this link between their virtual real estate and their brick and mortar store because it makes cooking easier for everyone and they can easily up-sell products and drive suggestive purchasing. Obviously if they could also extend this type of strategy into a mobile app that would completely tie the web site browsing experience with the in-store shopping experience then they would have something really powerful that would had the potential to drive a huge increase in sales.
So while Gojee.com still needs more content and stronger visual design opinion you can see a lot of good thinking here that is probably a good indicator of the digital strategy many grocery stores will be adopting in the near future.
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Google creates multi-dimensional search love
I have been really interested in multidimensional search results for a while. They are sites that start off like a normal search engine by take a single search term but return results in multiple forms (text, photos, videos, maps, blogs, etc.) from multiple sources on one page. Google has just launched WDYL.com which uses this multidimensional search concept. It asks you the simple question of “What do you love?” and the one page search results show pictures, alerts, patents, videos, statistics, books, translations, 3D SketchUp, latest news, blog searches, locations, group discussions etc. all pull from Google content sources of the thing you love.
I think you will continue see multidimensional search results grow in popularity until we hit a tipping point and one of the main stream search engines adopts it is their search result format. Yahoo! would be the closest since you can get a similar effect after doing a search when you can click the different mediums like photos, videos, shopping and news that appear above the search box and the results will change to the corresponding medium.
My favorite site to tackle the problem is still Addict-o-matic which I first wrote about two years ago and I like to more than WDYL.com for two reasons. The first is that I can customize the sources the site uses to return results which makes a huge difference in personalization and the quality of the search when you are dealing with so much data. The second is that I can browse broad news categories like politics, food or gadgets and the results are drawn from predetermined sources that are the most relevant for that subject.
In both cases I really like that they are challenging the traditional convention of search results because online content is much more diverse and much richer than it used to be and as a result people aren’t just looking for text links when they do a search.
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Virtual four eyes: AR Glasses Mirror
I think that the use of augmented reality in the fashion industry continues to have huge untapped potential. Tobi.com showed up the potential about a year and a half ago with their virtual dressing room that would let you try on clothes from the comfort of their own home instead of going to the store and wedging themselves into a dressing room. Now Japanese glasses retailer Zoff has released this augmented reality glasses “mirror” through which you can try on the company’s collection of eyewear. This site uses a markerless AR technology similar to what we have seen for sites like Iron Man where once you visually calibrate the system it can place and track the object on your face in three dimensions allowing you to see the glasses as you turn and move your head.
I think this remains a suprisingly untapped technology especially for smaller fashion brands who don’t have a huge retail footprint. It has that huge potential because people have an inherent need to see how clothes and accessories look on their body and a lot of people can’t do that with any confidence just using their imagination. That is compounded because the online buying experience doesn’t allow that to happen. This use of AR lets you get over a huge part of that hurdle by giving you real images and feedback on how the clothes and accessories look on you. Once you see that real image your confidence goes way up and more importantly so does your intent to purchase.
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Billboard makes you feel like a life saver
Getting people interested in pursuing careers in public health is an uphill battle for obvious reasons. This interactive digital bus shelter ad does a nice job of using a simple interaction to make people feel empowered and create that interest around public health professions.
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GOAB: Experience TV Concept
For a long time, watching television was very straightforward. For as long as I can remember it has been sitting on the couch in the living room facing the TV with a set number of channels playing certain shows at a designated time. Technology has completely changed that concept with the introduction of DVR’s to record shows to watch whenever you want and mobile apps that can set those DVRs from anywhere.
So as technology continues to evolve where does that experience go from here? The guys over at Syzygy labs spent some time to think about that question and came up with what I think is the best possible solution I’ve seen so far. You can watch the video above or check out their site that documents all of their thinking here.
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Twerrible Towel for #SteelersNation
I was born and raised in Pittsburgh so I pretty much had no choice but to become a die hard Pittsburgh Steelers fan. As a result when it comes to the Steelers my better judgement goes out the window and I do things like wear my Steelers jacket into the NYC Subway the week before they played the Jets so I could get flipped off and cursed at by homeless Jets fans among others. It gets worse with other facts like my dog was named the Steelers fan of the week a few years ago (seriously). I am fully aware of how out of character and ridiculous all of this is but here I am writing about it and making it worse so you get a sense of just how bad it is.
So with that in mind, what do you get when you combine a microcontroller, a repurposed fan motor, Twiiter, a hash tag and a Terrible Towel? The Twerrible Towel which is microsite housing a live stream of a repurposed mechanical contraption that will twirl a Terrible Towel every time someone tweets #SteelersNation. It was the brainchild of the agency McKinney who did the recent Sherwin Williams Color Chip campaign that I think was one of the most visually beautiful campaigns done last year. So far it is up to 16,000 twirls and counting so who knows where it will be come game day.
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The Dude’s site abides
I think that most people have at least one Jeff Bridges movie somewhere in their personal top 25 favorite movies and for me the Tron and The Big Lebowski easily make that list. Many people probably don’t know that he is also an accomplished musician, painter and photographer. I love his little known photography work that he creates with a 1940′s swing lens Widelux camera that take 180 degree black and white photos. I find the combination of the panoramic frame, behind the scenes subject matter and artist sensibility are a powerful combination. I recommend picking up the book he released a book of his photography a few years ago simply titled Pictures.
So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that his Web site is as diverse and creative as his talents and only Jim Carrey can rival it for a unique celebrity web site. I will say right up front that Jeff’s site is not the gold standard for web site design and layout best practices but as you start to experience the site you forgive the usability problems because you are won over by his creative vision and expression. The site looks like it was created by giving him long sheets of drawing paper and he created the site by writing, sketching, painting and pasting all the content and site navigation onto each page. As a result each page is it’s own unique experience with wildly different visuals, content taking all kinds of different forms and as a whole it creates a unique and personal expression of the artist that I like.
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Cortex for Google Chrome
I’ve never been someone who tricks out their web browser with tons of extensions and themes because I’ve never found any outside of Evernote that I found useful on a day to day basis. I did find a new one this week called Cortex for Google Chrome which is a free extension for the Google browser. When you find some content you want to share you can instantly post it to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, or Instapaper by simply clicking and holding over the content. After 1-2 second a ring appears around your cursor with the logos all of the previously listed services you have activated for use. Mouse over the service you want to share your content to and it will change into a text box for you to enter your comments. Click send and you are right back to doing whatever it was you were doing before you wanted to post your new found content. It’s ultra simple interface is the type of genius that make you mad you didn’t think of it first. Go download it now and enjoy.
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IDEO on the future of the books
IDEO recently released this video that explores three different possible future directions for books on digital readers and tablets. Each direction has been given a code name - Nelson, Coupland, and Alice. Nelson is a concept that is kind of like adding Omniture tracking into your digital book so you can see how the book has impacted conversations, debates, media coverage and even the reliability of your information. It is an interesting idea but to me this concept seems like it would be of more interesting to the authors and publishers than the general public since it is so metrics driven. Coupland recommends books you should be reading based on what your professional network is reading and what they have to say about it. For me this is a little too close to what Flipboard is doing with social media by turning your friends into a dynamic magazine. Alice is the most interesting of the three concepts as it takes the book and adds interactive elements like hidden content that is unlocked by user action or going to a certain location in the real world, getting mobile content from characters in the story or allowing parts of the story to become a non-linear narrative written my multiple authors. These are all interesting explorations of this emerging medium that are only undermined by the fact that they were created by IDEO so my expectation was that this was going really unique and original thinking instead of shades of other technologies we have already seen.
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Vitra Design Museum Hidden Heros
The Vitra Design Museum has launched an interesting site for their new exhibition called ‘Hidden Heros’ that looks at everyday objects we rarely think about because they have been produced a billion times but they are an indispensable part of our everyday life. There are 41 objects in the exhibition including the bar code, the clothes pin, tupperware, umbrellas and the egg carton. The concept of the exhibition is interesting but the design of the site is what really made it stand out for me.
The initial experience with the sites takes a little getting used to but once you get back that the interface is really interesting and well done. When you arrive at the site you need to choose one of the 41 objects which are represented by colored strips and then click ‘enter exhibition’. The interface is a mix of 2D and 3D elements that are blended together into a simple experience that retains is visual impact as you experience all of the content for each object. Also little details like the ability to click on content to scroll it instead of having a scroll bar are nice touches that make the site worth checking out.
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