Gidsy
Posted: January 22, 2012 Filed under: regular | Tags: Design, Web Leave a comment »
I discovered Gidsy while booking for the blog workshop I attended last week and I immediately fell in love with it, for several reasons.
Beautiful Design
Gidsy’s design has a tremendous good taste. The color palette is well chosen and is really easy on the eyes.
The chosen types are spot on as well:
- Myriad Pro Semi Condensed used in the headers; and
- Myriad Pro used in the text and UI controls.
Another great example on good taste are the colorful icons, which are present everywhere in the website. Simple and well designed, it is an example for the “one image is worth a thousand words” motto.
Great Usability
It is simple to use. Really simple. Kudos to Andrew McCarthy for having designed this delightful web site. I can see a lot of effort put on details that will remain unseen by the majority of users, such as the mouse-over transition from the “Gidsy” logo to “Home”.
Awesome!
Awesome Idea
Other than the extreme good taste and an example of well designed website, it is an example of modern and thoughtful implementation of a concept. Its creators aim to enable normal people like you and me to host exciting activities such as workshops and tours. It is basically the idea of think locally and act globally.
There are several examples of those interesting activities already being hosted there, such as Making fresh Pasta di Mama with AH food[1] and Amsterdam Sightrunning.
In fact, I found the idea so amazing that I’m thinking about host my own workshop, but I still don’t know the subject.
I think you also should consider doing it, because in life you’re either learning or teaching. And everybody have something to teach.
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AH stands for Albert Heijn, which is a dutch supermarket chain. This serves pretty much as example for the local thinking I mentioned before. ↩
Killing the browser
Posted: October 28, 2010 Filed under: regular | Tags: iPad, iPhone, UX, Web Leave a comment »With the advent of the iPhone and the iPad, richer applications will be needed to justify the need of these devices. Applications that make users desire them.
In my opinion, the web we know will never match the expectations created by such devices. Web applications will always reach 80% of an application’s potential while people consuming these new generation devices certainly will expect more. Way more.
The web I envision is a web where we use the network to deliver tailored data to our special application; where we really care about the users; and specially a web where we have no web browsers.
Yes. No browsers, at least the way we use them today. They are basically time sinks. People spend more time searching in the Internet instead of actually doing. The browser is an attempt to provide a generic solution for really specific problems.
Think a bit about it. How many desktop and mobile Twitter clients do we have nowadays? If the web is so good, why people bother building such applications, and other people buy them?
For example, the Twitter for iPad is a billion times better than Twitter’s website, even if compared with the new website version. The way you use it feels much more natural and interactive, and all the information is contained and available within the application itself. Of course it uses a contained web view in some places, and I think they’ve done a terrific job with it.
So, let’s start to put the dots in the right place: full featured, imersive and interactive applications must be as natural to the platform they’ll be used, while content should be provided to these applications, through the wire, as tailored as possible to increase imersion and user experience.
Maybe I’m wrong, but whenever I think about web applications I feel like a 2 year old kid trying to fit a cube in a cilinder hole.
