It’s not all about creating WOW-effects. You’ve gotta deliver some kind of value too. And this must be one of the better way can you deliver both of those qualities in a physical space.
Imagine what this would do for Swedish tourism if it was installed in any airport in the world showcasing our beautiful country. Imagine what it would do for a fashion brand if installed at the next fashion show letting people explore the behind the scenes, talk to the designers etc etc. Imagine what it would do for any brand if placed at any coming business fair. Get this one geared up with some online community functionality and you’ll have people peeing their pants!
Yesterday ReadWriteWeb reported on a new article skimmer interface over at New York Times. It’s a stunning new way to let you quick read the headlines of all the latest news from the Sunday Times. The simplicity of this thing is striking yet genius.
And as often before it turns out that content, usability and simplicity beats smart, strange and unique solutions online. Just have a look at Craiglists, the mother of simplicity.
Navigating on a website is merely a road to our goal ›› the content. By creating an interface that consist of a number of boxes that contain a small image, headline and an intro text, this new prototype makes it very easy for me to come back and browse the latest news in all categories. It doesn’t take me more than a couple of minutes until I’ve browsed the first page and another 16 sections.
The navigational experience is very close to my personal favorite RSS tool Netvibes. I bring all the feeds I want to read into my Netvibes account and then it doesn’t take me long to browse through the latest news online.
One of Johan Ronnestams Netvibes tabs.
The great benefits with these kind of solution is the way everything is equally weighed in terms of size, colors and content. The eye races over the screen and we’re not far from the offline morning paper behavior when we skimmer the newspaper before actually reading it. This was of course something that the Times wanted to replicate. Once they launch this simple interface as an iPhone widget then I’ll be the first to start using it. Until then I’ll continue to read my favorite Times sections through Netvibes, basically the same except for that Netvibes is actually better since you can read the entire article without leaving the interface.
Yahoo Pipes. A great tool. Right now I’m finalising my design RSS feed project where I’m putting more than 80 design blogs into a pipe and then after some filtering I can keep track of all 80. Sweet. Then as I tried it out today, out came a poster from a blog called DesignNotes. I like it.
It makes me warm to see that companies out there are starting to utilize the possibilities that comes with social media. IKEA has definitely understood how to make good use of web-TV as they started their own IKEA.SE/TV where you are invited to upload your own interior decoration tips.
What’s even better is the fact that they’ve stuck to blogging standards when they have designed the whole thing and not fallen into the trap of trying to do something new and different. According to BuiltWith they’ve used Ruby on Rails to create it. However, I do recognize a lot of plugins, so it wouldn’t surprise me if WordPress or something similar was stuck in the bottom of the whole thing.
Jacob Nielsen, famouse user interaction dude from Denmark once said: “People spend most of their time visiting other sites”
This blog is written by Johan Ronnestam. He's widely regarded as one of Sweden’s leading speakers and authorities in the field of modern creative and conceptual thinking and skill of innovating brands and their communication. In 2010 the readers of Microsoft Indikat named Johan Swedens most influential authority within digital communication
