S8080 Blog

I was in town yesterday for a few meetings.

Bumped into these guys while waiting to cross the road – something I haven’t witnessed since I was a lad.

Every now and again, we get an RFP sent to us that has a ‘selection of sites we like’ included in the spec’. We had one through last week that included our very own MBWales.com, stating that the UI was ‘very obvious’. We like stuff that’s very obvious, so we were pleased as punch.

Then this press cutting turned up a few days later, from March 2002, with me and Visit Wales’s Jon Munro looking a whole lot younger – and smarter Jon

Don’t you just love it when stuff like this pops up?

I still have that bike, although it’s gathering dust waiting for one of my sons to be tall enough to ride it. Check out that Apple monitor too!

One of the email invites we designed for the 2010 e-Crime Wales Summit made the Campaign Monitor Gallery today. We developed a series of emails that were broadcast on the run up to the event, held on Thursday in the Celtic Manor Resort – each pushing our front end development team with the demanding build required to show the design at its best in a multitude of email clients.

Davida Fernandez of Campaign Monitor said…

“I really like the unusual layout of this email designed by s8080, especially the way the map graphic is burning into the main content and the way the free floating secondary content is flanking the middle column. The three colour bar background is so interesting and provides a foundation for the important links on the left hand side. The nice narrow column always helps with readability, too. Super cool job on this one.”

We have specialised in email newsletter and campaign design, production, broadcast, list management and analytics for quite a few years now and have 100’s of successful ‘mails under our belts.

We are currently running a stunning and groundbreaking campaign for Welsh Assembly Government’s  IBW and as soon as they have all been delivered, we show them on the blog.

An inspired Goodyear ad by Leagas Delany, Milan.

From I believe in advertising.

On the S8080 Blog, we’ve recently begun using a really cool service called Apture. Apture allows you to easily incorporate multimedia elements straight into a single web page – or, in this case, a blog post.

Traditionally, a blog entry may contain a link to (for example) a Wikipedia entry, or a YouTube video, or a photo on Flickr – but clicking any of these links would take you away from the original content that you were reading. You’d lose your place, and clicking around to multiple sites while you’re trying to read can just be a pain. Apture’s aim is to bring all of this disparate content together, and try to make the web less flat.

Apture allows you to create special links in your posts that open up snippets of content within the current page. This allows readers to keep their place, look up a particular piece of information, and get right back to what they were doing in the first place.

The easiest way to demonstrate is with an example, of course. So in a blog entry, we could be telling you about Swansea – Apture allows us to link in Wikipedia entries, maps, photos, video… even Twitter tweets! You name it, you can link it in with Apture. It makes web pages much more dynamic, and puts all of this content to really good use. As Apture themselves say:

“By transforming flat web pages into connected multimedia experiences readers can fluidly dive into related information without losing their place on the page so they can see, hear and truly experience the ideas on the page.”

Exciting stuff!

ITV’s coverage of the greatest bike race on the planet starts tonight at 7.00pm and the race kicks off tomorrow in Monaco with a 15.5km individual time trial (a great chance to see how space age cycling has become).

I have been following it ever since I can remember and for me, the Tour IS summer. The official site is looking pretty good this year.

With 21 stages, this year we can enjoy…

• 10 flat stages
• 7 mountain stages
• 1 medium mountain stage
• 2 individual time-trial stages
• 1 team time-trial stage

Found a good video of the route…

There is a beginners guide and TV schedule on the ITV Sport site if you fancy giving it a go. You can download the official map and details of the stages here.

We often get asked the question – “how many users do we need to test our site on?“, In most cases I really believe the ideal number is 5, current thinking is that it’s better to spend the usability budget on a number of rounds of testing by 5 users rather than say 1 test with more users.

Typically the first 3 users will find nearly all the biggest usability problems with the site (see: Jakob Nielson’s March 2000 article: ‘Why you only need to test with 5 users‘) – so keep the groups small and focus on finding and fixing the key usability problems.

A wonderful umbrella from Tibor Kalman, the Hungarian designer who blew my socks off with the Benetton ‘Colors’ magazine in the early 90’s.

The magazine gained notoriety for its treatment of race issues showing QEII as a black woman, Spike Lee as white and the Pope as Asian.

I still have a handful of copies of the early issues on my bookshelf.

Here’s a really interesting piece of eye tracking work done by Jakob Nielsen (April 2006): F-Shaped pattern for reading online

The eye tracking study of 232 users found users often read web pages in an F shaped pattern:

• first users read in a horizontal movement across the page
• then they move down the page and read a second shorter horizontal movement
• then the users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement.

These eye tracking heatmaps clearly show the F shaped pattern.

Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Tee shirt by Busted Tees.