ia play

Jim Ramsey writes at A List Apart about designing for flow (challenge carefully balanced with your abilities) rather than ease of use. I was very excited to find someone applying Csikszentmihalyi’s theories to web design. And even more so to find Jim tackling the keep-it-simple/making-the-complex-clear debate:

“The goal should not necessarily be to create a simple site. The goal should be to create a site that feels painless to use no matter how complex it really is. But wait, you might be thinking, hasn’t there been a simplicity movement in web design over the last few years? Yes, but there’s a learning curve for any site that seeks to solve a complex problem. We shouldn’t confuse simplicity with a desire to avoid needless complexity.”

Blackbeltjones was also bemoaning the tendency to stick with ‘don’t make me think’ in design and set himself the goal to create services that ‘scamper between beautiful extremes‘ of designs to be glanced at and those to be pored over.

Ramsey’s four flow-based rules reminded me of one BBC team’s (unsuccessful) iPlayer pitch which began with the analogy of a remote control with the more advanced buttons hidden, concealed from everyday use. We have a tendancy never to build those advanced buttons because most of the users (and/or our target users) never use them but we have to remember that simplicity is only one reason that evangelists evangelise.

I’m studying psychology with the Open University at the moment. This is helping tie together random thoughts about designing websites for people to use, understanding creativity at work and organisational psychology.

The course I have started with is Y163 – Starting with psychology. It is a short course and very structured since it is an Openings course, intended for students unsure if undergraduate study is for them. So far I’ve avoided any full length OU courses as I’m a bit nervous about the time commitment (and sporadic outbursts of laziness). I might consider Exploring psychology next Autumn. Or perhaps Ethnography or Challenge of the Social Sciences in May.

You can get a taster of the OU’s psychology materials through OpenLearn:

I’ve put together this list of free course materials from Open University that might be useful to IAs. I’ve got a much bigger list of courses from MIT’s OpenCourseWare to sift through (more on that later).

It has been a long time since the ‘glass-wall‘ redesign of the BBC homepage. We have tweaked it here and there in the interim but it was definitely looking tired.

Last week we opened up the new version to the public, hopefully to replace the existing homepage shortly: http://www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/

I won’t go into the overall concept as Richard has covered most of it at rxdxt. The clock was an interesting concept for an IA as it was quite consciously and overtly not meant to be useful. We know you all have the time on screen already. It is just there to make you feel warm and fuzzy.

From a navigation point of view we’ve quite consciously stopped trying to be all things to all people. The old homepage was laden with links and many of them heavily under-used, a consequence of a remit to promote the depth and breadth of the site. The new version is more focused around regular tasks (and even more so if you customise it) and promotions.

Given the volume of traffic this page receives, it has been an interesting journey to sell the concept that the depth and breadth are best promoted in other ways but one that has been mostly successful. Over the next year I’m hoping to see a much greater focus on contextual navigation, recommendations and search as ways of surfacing the content.

We’ve still got work to do on that directory but that comes later…