Silently, like a ninja roaming the plains of the Serengeti, we launched a newly redesigned RadioTail.com.

It’s been about a year since we launched RadioTail the company, and a little less than that since we launched the first iteration of the website. We chose to redesign for a slew of reasons – most importantly, we have a much better idea of the goals of our company.

When a startup . . . starts up, as a founder and entrepreneur you think you have it all figured out. You think – “This is your business plan, this is your customer/client/user, this is your ultimate goal”. Then pretty quickly, things change. Your plan is redirected, Your goals shift, your users aren’t who you thought they’d be. A static representation of who you are as a company (aka your public web site) can become very outdated very soon.

The intention of this redesign was to showcase what RadioTail can do for you. Be you Podcaster, Media Co., or Advertiser, we created direct “call-to-action” to find out more information about our service.

The main aspect of the redesign was highlighting the most important textual elements of the site with darker, larger text. A scan of the site will give you the gist, without having to read every word. I also wanted to clean up the layout, get rid of the rounded corners (_thats sooooo 2005!_), and give the entire site more whitespace and contrast.

The only major hurdle in the design was dealing with Internet Explorer (as usual). Primarily, I wanted (NEEDED) to use 24-bit PNG’s for the Logo, so I could get that really nice drop-shadow without having to worry about matting garbage. Of course, IE doesn’t know what alpha transparency is. Luckily there are some good fixes out there.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with how it came out. Hopefully, this design will stick a little longer – but whose to say that a business shouldn’t redesign it’s site every year?

I get stumped a lot when designing. It’s so easy to. In programming and development, a problem I can’t seem to solve is usually just some deep thought or a google away. With design its so much harder to work through a block. To come up with something original and aesthetically pleasing is difficult. Include the necessity of good user interface and you add another level. Then try to do it on the spot or in a deadline and its damn near impossible.

Thank god for the endless source of visual content that is the world-wide-web. When designing for the Web its pretty easy to find examples of good and sexy CSS designs. CSS Beauty, for example. Also the original CSS Gallery, The Zen Garden. Often these sites just make me doubt my own designs more than anything else. Some of them are so good. And moreover, when I spend any amount of time looking at them, I find myself subconsciously putting their ideas in my own sketches – which is never good for originality.

So instead of turning examples of the end product, I start a little further back. One step backwards, is one of my favorite blogs, Swissmiss. Tina Roth Eisenberg blogs about all things cool design, including furniture, photography, and classic design. Its also my daily source of things I wish I could afford.

A step back from that, is my online obsession, photo-blogs. The first stop on the photo train is flickr. Flickr is great for just plain surfing. Start here – and wind up here I also can get enough of the swedes 40h and ulvelius. Browsing beautiful photos is great way to get the creative engine chugging. What I find most attractive in photos is colors and contrast. Often I’ll find a photo whose palate is exactly what I’m looking for. (If you’re on a Mac, you can copy and paste a photo in to the color chooser tool in any application and use it as your palette.)

A while ago I bought COLOR IMAGE SCALE on the recommendation of Treehouse Magazine. It is a really interesting study of the way colors and color combinations are associated with emotions and adjectives.

Start with color and work your way up.

Photo Credit : http://www.flickr.com/photos/smartfat/201884840/

I’ve been using Windows Vista Beta on my home media center now for over a month. Needless to say, it’s a step up from XP, but I still cant get over just how sloppy it is. The “glass” interface is much cleaner and nicer to look at, and some elements, like the start menu, have major design improvements, making for much easier navigation. Here comes the but.

BUT

It crashes all the time. I’d simply write this off as an affect of beta software, but something tells me the Release version is still going to have problems with freezing up.

Pertaining more to this conversation, it’s not cohesive. As a whole the design and interface improvements are great – but thats the problem – they’re not whole. Most menu’s fit into the new ‘glass’ paradigm, but every once in a while you’ll get a dialog or a menu that looks like Windows ‘95, and you’re completely thrown off. Again, Id throw it off to the beta – then I found this little diddy? (Via blackrimglasses). At some levels I just cant fathom this. Does Microsoft just not have the resources? Did someone overlook this? Do they just not care?

User interface and cohesiveness, if they are to exist in a computer workstation, must start at the operating system. Users want need to be given a clear set of idioms for how they operate and use a computer. At the most basic level, the icon to close an application should probably look the same throughout an operating system.

One of the reasons I switched and will argue for Apple, is Aqua, the cohesive interface standard that makes Mac OS X so pretty. The interface for the operating system, menus, icons, toolbars, and even the Apple applications are completely standardized. Most third party applications even try to conform to this standard, which makes using a combination of Apple and third party apps so easy and seamless.

I feel one of Windows biggest problems is that they haven’t grasped this yet. Many application use completely different interfaces to stand out. Basic interface elements, like menus, toolbars, and icons should be inherited from the OS. Is Microsoft ever going to grasp this? Even at the most basic level of a font menu?

“What was it about?”
“This company was spending the whole morning showing us around this new web management software.”
“You mean like showing you what it can do?”
“No, like showing us where to click to do each thing”

My Mom works at a worldwide corporate accounting firm in Education and Training. Even (or especially) at an organization that size, I couldn’t believe that they would take an entire morning to take people out of their desks and show them ‘where to click’. Maybe I’m just completely naive, but you shouldn’t have to be ‘shown around’ an application.

I’ve been thinking a lot about User Interface (UI) recently, and what it means to be ‘User Friendly’. I think there are a lot of misconceptions in the recent bombardment about what a good interface should be. I have to preface this by saying that I think the recent wave of web applications, in terms of UI are, in general, leaps and bounds over the applications of 5 years ago. At some point its become apparent, at least in the public web, that user experience is important.

I believe that a great application should be completely self explanatory. Upon first glance, as a user, you should be able to know ‘where to click’ and what your possibilities of action are. Applications aren’t always simple or limited to few tasks. However, just because an application has complicated functionality and abilities, does not mean that the interface has to be just as complicated.

I think no where is this more a problem than in the Enterprise application space. I’m about to set out on the journey of developing and licensing ‘enterprise’ software, so this discussion is very pertinent to me now. It could be very easy for me to build all the functionality required, and then just throw a thousand links to each action on a page and expect to just show clients how to use it. There are so many reasons why spending a little more time thinking about and implementing a clean and focused interface is such a better idea.

1. Customer support is not scalable like databases or servers. Sure, you could build a team of people who could go from institution to institution teaching clients ‘where to click’, but if you really want to grow quickly there is no way to scale person-to-person instruction on a manageable level.

1. It focuses the applications direction. Jason Fried would have you build the interface first, but I think simultaneous construction is more realistic. Letting the choices you make about where navigation goes can inform your decisions on the code and architecture. Deciding what’s important to the application can inform both the interface and the development.

1. It makes everyones lives easier. That may sound a little delusional, but spending time on interface makes every level of development, testing, and use a little easier (or at least it should). If you’ve ever done QA or functional testing, you’ll agree that not having to search for a link or function to test is a relief. If QA’ing the application is difficult perhaps things aren’t as easy as they should be?

Applications in general should not have to be taught. If they are too complicated to use without some sort of guidance the help should be viewable and readable from within the application itself. As a user I should be able to sit down an go. No lessons, no meetings, USE!

Either way, she dreams of being a professional blogger, and she’s the most amazing poet I know (and I’m not just saying that to score points – she totally is).

Go forth and check it out: Kat Howard

The design and website are all me, and the registration system is even hand built. The registration system was all done with agility – which was the most fun part of the whole process. I’m happy with the site as a whole, though I wish I was a better Flash animator – perhaps if I had more time/practice . . .

This is now the second full site that I’ve built with Rails and deployed into a production environment. Getting the first one up and running was a lot harder, considering I had to do all the fast-cgi/apache set up myself. My Rails skills are growing quickly at this point. I knew all I needed was to learn syntax and get some more real experience – I learn by doing. With the pickaxe at my side I can attack any Ruby mountain. Im always coming back to a quote in the font by Ben Giddings:

“In C, I’m always having to work around the limitations of the language; In Ruby, Im always discovering a neater, cleaner, more efficient way of doing things.”

Greg is great at PowerPoint – but really its the little things that matter. You have to remember with PowerPoint documents is that most likely, the people you show them, see TONS of presentations or slides a week. TONS (as in multiples of a lot). So for them to see a slide show that uses the default settings for text in a document, shows a lack of effort. Maybe they don’t think that outright, or really know or understand that Arial (color: black) is the default, but they know they’ve seen it a hundred times. Really, all it takes to stand out is a simple font change. Obviously, content matters, but in terms of presentation, a little change of font and color can make a world of difference.

Not only is it about just picking a random (cool-looking) font, its about Identity. Creating a print/web identity is hugely important. It lets users/customers/general-peeps associate a font and group of colors with your business. For VV, the font is Trebuchet MS. Its only a side-step from Arial, but its different enough to be noticeable. (Note: the logo is a different font, Soul Papa to be exact.) The colors are all dark blues and dark grays. The point is, pick out a set of fonts and colors – and stick to them. Moreover, in PP, pick some rules for headers, bullets, etc. (like CSS) and stick to them.

This was my first ever html newsletter design – but once I realized that I could just do XHTML/CSS it dint take very long. In about a days time we had our first Podcast Media Mixer – and a website to boot. The design is pure CSS and web standards and that saved me a load of time when I went to check it in IE. Just one box model adjustment and It was good to go. Then I got to work with campaign monitor. Which was just a real pleasure. Even though it looked nice I was dreading having to go through any sort of set up process or archaic multi-screen validation cut-and-paste bullshit. Alas – I was saved – Campaign Monitor was really well thought out and designed.

Now after all that, they sent us a little high-five by putting my design in their Design Gallery along with the likes of IconBuffet and Threadless, two of my favorite sites.

Ahh – the 80 hour weeks begin to pay off.