black + blum – Official website and shop.
These guys seem very creative industrial designers but I thought there was a basic UI issue with the product page, which led to a confusing user experience.
When clicking on the forward button next to the primary image on the product page, you are taken to a new (related) product.
I initially thought the button would take me to an alternative view of the product I was viewing as represented by the thumbnails below the main image. This was encouraged by the fact that there was no indication that there were a sub-set of related products to the main item.
A small thing but annoying thing in an otherwise simple but well executed website.
I’ve registered and even added a response to a question. I’m still not sure how this will differentiate itself from other similar sites – though I will confess to liking the User Experience quite a lot. I found it very easy to get started and find topics of interest.
Ultimately I suspect that the success of this site will be based on the (by now old) Web 2.0 cliche, the quality of the community.
Quora – How did Mint acquire 1.5m+ users without a high viral coefficient, scalable SEO strategy, or paid customer acquisition channel?.
The response to the question above is a good example, with the lead designer and one of the first hires, responding. Then again, my beloved FriendFeed had a great community and never achieved critical mass!
Hardware
- The keyboard takes a bit of getting used to but is not as bad as I was led to believe.
- The display feels smaller than I expected.
- The headphone jack is in a terrible location that precludes the proper use of the keypad when the headphones are attached.
Software
- It is a tablet computer running a full OS. This is about as far from the mobile device as a consumer appliance as you can get.
- As a result the phone functionality is and feels incidental to the device.
- If you’re an app obsessive stay away!
- There’s a huge amount of horsepower still to be tapped.
- Incredible multi-tasking ability.
Bottom line – It reminds me of my first experiences with linux on the desktop. Frustrating but fundamentally right. If it wasn’t for the lack of proper evernote and dropbox apps I’d be totally in love with this thing.
Patagonia – The Footprint Chronicles: Tracking the Environmental and Social Impact of Patagonia Clothing and Apparel.
More a page review really.
Hugely impressed for a number of reasons:
1) The animation showing the journey of the product through its entire lifecycle is done in a compelling and elegant way. Though I was initially confused as to whether I should navigate via the dots marking the locations on the map or the thumbnails associated with them, once I realised it was the latter, the process was very smooth.
2) The integration of rich media via you tube to further expand on the background to each development phase of the product was excellent too.
3) The icons on the left with information on key environmental indicators of the product were – like the entire execution on the concept – simple, attractive and got the job done. A combination of these is much harder to do than you might expect.
4) As much as I love visual and technical execution of the concept, I might be most impressed by the product description content. Patagonia appear very upfront about the product including (in the example I’m using) an admission they are terminating this particular offering soon due to insufficient sales. Obviously there’s a bit of marketing speak coming in there with a message to the effect that “if you love the environment buy MOAR of our stuff!”
