I sure have my own comments to these mocks (won’t show all relevant content in 1024×768 or lower screen resolutions being the first and most obvious), but they are not meant as anything more than a test, with the privilege of not having to deal with any constraints: business, marketing, organizational or otherwise (which means I can keep Adblock on also in GIMP ).

I had two immediate reactions. Firstly, clutter. There is a lot of movement in the icons, in an less-than-orderly way, without anyone element having particular prominence. Even the “sett inn annonse” bit, placed squarely in the middle and with intended prominence, is a little lost.
Espen commented wisely on the principles of icon design, and even offered an alternative to test the difference:

And in fact Espen’s test reduces dramatically the clutter and the movement in the GUI, with great benefits for readability, both the visual and textual type. And, if I may say so, with great benefits for (my) peace of mind.
The second reactions I have often when using Finn.no: there is no usable principles of order in the listing of categories. It is not alphabetical, which is usually the safest bet. There may be some internal principles (will to drive traffic to this or that channel, by revenue, etc.), but as a user I am not very interested in internal principles, I want to find my entry point quickly.
Of course Finn.no has a large user base which is loyal, which is to say, users return often, so they have a good chance to learn. this principle, learning, should lead UI designers to take advantage of it by designing UIs which are very efficient after a learning period. Finn.no however seems to use some questionable criteria for ordering elements, such as number of properties in the real property channel, which does not provide any fix structure: as the number of properties change, the list is re-shuffled accordingly. As a Finn.no user I am often confused (and irritated) by it.
I wouldn’t expect the homepage to be re-shuffled that often however. What I am trying to say is that, short of clearly privileging anyone channel, the safest bet is to order alphabetically, as this ordering choice is understood across the board, without drawbacks compared to current choice (for users).
I also think that the “sett inn annonse” element could be placed elsewhere than in between the content categories, and still benefit from its size and visibility.

Icons on deeper pages

On deeper pages, particularly channels main pages such as real property, the presentation is slightly different, with some advantages and some drawbacks. The first advantage is the presentation of the text: larger font size, black color. Much easier to scan and read than the softer blue and smaller size on homepage. However, the icons become less useful as the difference between them tends to be a question of nuances. to still refer to the real property example, the same icon is used for all residential property, and then the same icon for all holiday housing categories. The differentiation is left to secondary visual elements, which tend to require processing and prevent quick scanning of the information space. So I’d say that icons get in the way, rather than being beneficial.
I shall now ponder whether to mock an alternative design which incorporate my reflections.

[...] dozens of New York artists and activists battled the clutter of consumerism in a guerrilla-style billboard takeover. Mobilized by Jordan Seiler and the Public Ad Campaign, the 24-hour direct action replaced nearly 19,000 square feet of illegal advertising with original, anti-corporate street art.

The political aim of the project is that of helping communities regain control of the space they occupy, the means: art and design.

While being off the web (been too busy to write meaningful posts), I have tried to keep this website updated via twitter, using the wordpress plugin Twitter Tools. While the plugin worked very nicely, the outcome of weekly “twitter digest” hasn’t been any good. So I have deleted them all, and decided to tweet less and write a meaningful post every once in a while.

Politics and Design
I have added “politics” in the tagline of this blog. What does it mean…Well I will try to follow Viktor Papanek’s example and discuss and discover how the politics is embodied in designs, and how design(ers) can be (do) politics (Ah, AdBusters offer a great example). From Wikipedia:

Papanek was a philosopher of design and as such he was an untiring, eloquent promoter of design aims and approaches that would be sensitive to social and ecological considerations. He wrote that “design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself).”

Meanwhile, (and I acknowledge it very late, though better than never I suppose) I have to give it to the guys at Finn.no. Super Kudos, and many thanks, for taking my posts seriously, and bringing me news of changes which satisfies one of my user experience remarks (complaints…? ) on ordering a real estate prospectus (see Why is ordering real estate prospects on finn.no so difficult?). In fact, you can read what the good Eivind@finn said commenting on my post.

Now I can focus on getting more stuff improved! I could start by wondering why is it that there are some “half-ajax” functionalities on finn.no….or maybe not, not now -

So I guess all the bickering about following web-standards actually do comply =)

Anyway: Cool to see that different gadgets gets more and more connected.

Mother Tab
What I call Mother Tab is really a new way to open (ctrl-t) a new tab in Chrome. The tab won’t be empty, but it has 5 main UI modules:

1. a most visited webpages grid
2. a search form
3. a recent bookmarks
4. a recently closed tabs module
5. a bookmark area

The purpose of this is to streamline interaction by providing the top web destination and the most recent ones at a glance when users open a new tab, following the idea that “users want to go somewhere” when they open a new tab.

I find it very useful, although I would have liked to be able to set my own default grid. But I count on the fact that in time, the statistical record of visited websites will be at least as good as Firefox 3’s new location bar suggestions. But here’s a screehshot:

Particularly interesting the placement of a bookmark bar, which is a good way to introduce the next novelty.

Moving Controls from main window to Tab

This move seems to be beneficial in several respects. Firstly, it reduces the overhead of controls and options, removing from main view extra clutter. Secondly, and consequently, it allows increasing the useful real estate, so that more content is shown with the same window size. Thirdly, and referring to the Bookmark bar mentioned above, it brings access to both “favorite” bookmarks and full bookmark list again following the principle that if you ope na new tab you wish to go somewhere. Finally, it just looks neat

In conclusion - and leaving aside the supposedly great technological innovations relating to javascript and crash control - after a very short usage, Google Chrome looks like a very good product. What remains to be seen is whether and to what extent the dev community will embrace it and create plugins and extensions matching those of Firefox…..

I wonder how come in all those years nobody at finn.no thought that it could be very useful to have the ordering form automatically filled with the user’s data stored in the user’s profile, so as to make the ordering of prospects an easy one-click process! After all, it seems the perfect little scrum project….go figure…..