Dec 22, 2009
Griddy
Patterns and grids were supposed to make design(digital I mean) a bit easier and, thank God, they did to certain point. I remember times before 960, when I’d use canonical grid mixed with golden ratio and some human perception knowledge I got while studying art.There was Jakob with his ugly idea of usability. Well, idea was great but the presentation had some traumatic results on some. Then of course there was always a story to be told which someone called journey and then added a user to that whole new experience. And the UX has been born.
Recently I saw this nice and sad link browsersize. Sad because so many people can’t see the donate button. Nice because it says that not much has changed in last decade. Well actually in last millenium. We’ve been always doing certain things the way we do, and some uneducated plonkers thought they’d reinvented the wheel with usability(I mean all those wankers that follow blindly rules of grid systems and false kindergarten science). There are still blank spots on the map of our behavior with regards to our journeys and decision making process but hey, for some it is still not very obvious that people(with christian background) read left to right and that it affects composition(positive and negative).
Browsersize is a great…hmm let’s call it tool. (On many occasions, I did have to pull out F shape print outs as in the last resort and be told to back off because the web ‘is changing’ so this may be one more useful weapon for those still crusading dark-ages).But that’s not what I am really on about. What I am on is the obvious implication of the above observation. It only confirms what we’ve known for centuries. So it is time to start seeing what’s under those rules because grid designs aren’t the final solution neither are pixel-perfect Mac OS X rip offs. So I always love to see when one gores the 960. I am getting bored with that slick, colorful barf that defines what is good digital design. I wonder what is usual dwell time on those sites? Some may know the answer and if it is more then 30sec it means someone forgot it has opened in a back. Proper user experiences aren’t that rare but that usually requires whole new grid to work with. 4 dimensional one.
Most of current grids require 2D thinking, plus eventually some twists. Where shiny stuff is just a nice package for mind blowing emptiness. Designing user’s time on a page and the depth of the journey defines 2 more dimensions that many designers completely ignore glorifying ‘let’s just scratch the surface’ culture. No I won’t give examples, show pie-charts nor flood blogosphere with ‘visual aids’. It is all about thinking which is something that cannot be found on a web or thought through tutorials. It is something that requires a bit of courage to look deeper.