Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Art and the Art of the User Interface

You might have noticed a few graphics on the blog, namely the title and the blue background sidebar thing, have gone missing. Those things were still being hosted at my old hewitt.org URL which is now gone. The back up of all the stuff that was hosted there is on my "Elements" portable hard drives which is sitting over at Eric#3's house with a broken power adapter. It just happens to have some proprietary power cord that you can't buy anywhere.

Doesn't matter as I've decided that it was about time to give the site a make over anyway. I fired up Photoshop and have been spending the last hour or so messing around, but haven't really created anything I like yet.

Right in the middle of this, I started randomly browsing Deviant Art for some inspiration. Just poking around to see if anything gave me any ideas. Eventually I hit something (nudity) that required me to log-in and I wanted to share something about that process.

First go to Deviant Art, pop down a few directories, then use the log-in in fields at the top of the page to log into the site. Notice how it resets the site and suddenly you are back at the very top of the directory tree. Hope you remember which sub-category of which category you were browsing in.

Now go to Hulu and start browsing down through their stuff. When ever you feel sufficiently immersed in their content, use the log-in fields at the top of the page to log into the site. Note that it did NOT change anything else on the page. You are still exactly where you were before you logged in.

Bravo to the Hulu guys, well done. Apparently the Deviant Art guys were too cool for school and need a few more lessons in usability.

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