Beyond the Button

courtesey Ard Hesselink
This Friday I thought I would post on some of the tools that our web/media group has been using lately.

Assembla

Writing code is hard. Writing code in a group that might not even be on the same floor, building, or state is much harder. Assembla is a set of the key collaboration tools that programming teams need, all rolled into one off-site package. SVN, Trac, a wiki, and even Scrum reporting tools. We initially used it as a stop-gap measure while we got our own SVN server up. Now we're finding it hard to tear ourselves away.

IRC

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around for a long, long while, but we hadn't really thought of it as a work tool until real recently. After two of our finest web/media developers returned from the 2008 DrupalCon, they informed us about a whole 'nother world of Drupal support and discussion living on the IRC channels. I tried it out for a couple of hours one Sunday I was amazed at how much live help was out there for some complex stuff I was trying to figure out. I'm on a mac so I use Colloquy to get on Drupal's IRC channels. Obviously this isn't Drupal specific. There are many channels for the topic you are currently banging your head over right now.

ScreenKeys

What's cooler than a button? A button with a little display built in. Screenkeys are little programmable LCD screens in buttons and switches. These could be quite fun for customized and changing content. The options for control in a game could change every time a visitor plays. We aren't using these yet but I just threw them in for fun.

Any of all those crazy acronyms throw you for a loop? Post a question about how we are using these tools and I'll try and fill you in.

An interesting experiment in click-free user interfaces http://dontclick.it/

I've stumbled across a couple interesting navigation designs recently that have a playful feel that doesn't get in the way of their actual usability.

Hanna Werning's design portfolio uses a randomly placed map of links that is quite simple and nice. It's easy to forget that simple can often be the best approach.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia uses a common icon of the art museum, a gallery guard, to liven up the navigation in a way that I kept expecting to get annoying but actually grew to love.

OK, but fancy and fun doesn't cut it entirely when you are thinking about navigation and more broadly, interaction design. You have to consider a broader array of interactions between the visitors and your media. Over on welie.com they've built a rather complete list of all of the common ways that users interact with information on a website and the pluses and minuses of each of their applications. It's unlikely that you've invented a new method of interacting with media or information when designing an experience so this list give you a good reference for how to apply different solutions appropriately.