View Design Evolution

In January of 2007 things were different than they are now. Kobe didn’t have an MVP, but was still a jerk. The French government allowed smoking in public places. YouTube is blocked in Brazil. View design was in it’s infancy. Now, though, kids in Brazil are free to watch videos of DDR mishaps, smoking isn’t allowed in public places in France, and Kobe has an MVP under his belt.

View design has come a long way since Chris, Brandon, and I started work on the first View builds. It’s amazing what a year will do. Initial thoughts led me to just display information and results in a really appealing, aesthetic way. Don’t get me wrong, aesthetics are a very important part of the web in general, but with each View I designed, I learned more and more that having a lot of lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a pig. I needed to learn how to conceptualize a better and more functional pig.

View design works best when it’s parts are working together rather than just laid next to each other. Getting different sites’ information and results to show you a better picture of what you’re searching for is what I’ve come to aim for.

Take a rough general View I was working on back in January of 2007. It looks much nicer than Google, you’re getting image results from Flickr, you can see some screen shots of the websites, and that’s about it. There isn’t much by way of cohesion or invitation to information. It’s a View that just shows you some junk on the web. Good, but not best. The results are just next to each other, they aren’t working together.

In February of 2008, Joshua and I worked up the Weather View. I’m pretty stoked on it, to be perfectly honest. Aesthetically, it’s appealing and clean, but it’s how the information is given to you, how your results are displayed and work together, that make it shine. Information from Yahoo!, Weather.com, AccuWeather, and SunLight all work together to give you a great picture of weather for whatever city you live in. Or, like I do, whatever city you search and fantasize about living in.

It took me a while to start working in the kind of content synergy that should have been obvious at the beginning, but I’m glad I figured it out. It helped that we brought on a lot of people who are much smarter than me. View design changed for me when I stopped starting the process with a blank Photoshop canvas and used a blank sheet of paper and a pencil instead. It’s the sources and data that really matter and shine, and when you start there you get much more satisfying results. You start to think about what is being delivered and how those small data nodes can work together to deliver more than just results on a page. Blah blah blah experiential website blah blah community. We all know the buzzwords, but sometimes they are used in a purposeful manner. The Views we design now are creating an easier experience for everyone who searches with Viewzi. By shifting my focus to that mentality, I was able to start delivering more appropriate Views and not just fancy Photoshop files that some monkey pushed pixels around on.

It’s the marriage of little bits of information from different sites that create an intriguing result. Having it look nice and not render in your browser’s default typeface helps a bit.