ia play

Wimbledon have a new website for this year’s tournament and one of the most striking things about it is the use of background photography.

On the homepage the background dominates with only a fraction of the real estate taken up by content or navigation. Compared to traditional lets-stuff-everything-on-there homepages this works quite well…depending on the choice of image.

There’s quite a few images being used in rotation but thus far the overhead shots of grass and the shots dominated by blue skies seem to work.

But there’s a few in the mix that I find distracting and not particularly pleasant as backgrounds. I’m not convinced by the ball boys and girls:

The scoreboard is far far too busy:

And the strawberries (of which there are at least two variations) just freak me out:

But I’ll forgive them if they change the blue-sky shots to soggy one when it actually does rain. No Cliff Richard please.

The end of my second stint at the Guardian is nearly here. I’ll be  finishing a few things off over the summer and then moving on.

I’ll remember this stint for my ’3 users a week’ user testing, setting up the product voices panel, and testing a prototype I made with Xcode. The kind of work that is being taken to a whole different level by Craig Spencer, now heading up the Guardian’s UX research.

The best times were more fun than any other time in my 12 year career.

I’m not leaving a purple dog-filled office this time, although it’s not often you get art galleries in the office basement. Grayson Perry’s Map of Nowhere is quite good for IA inspiration at the moment.

It’s been a gift working with  Martin, Lynsey & Alastair: sketching in Camley Street Nature Reserve, munching our way through Eat.St and drinking/goose watching by the canal.  I’m very very sad that our little UX team is dispersing but I suspect I’ll work with them all again on other things.

Things to take away this time:

• nothing beats working with developers who can build it *better* than you drew it
• you must always stick things on the walls
• it’s amazing how fast you can get stuff done if you don’t ask if you can do it