This image comes from a pretty fascinating post from Information Architects, who participated in a paid pitch to redesign the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. They lost the pitch, but evaluate the pros and cons of their approach in a thorough and truly humble way in this post.
They had some interesting ideas coming from the perspective of online user interface design, most of which I think would be wonderful to see put into practice. In particular, their idea of using blue text to highlight keywords within the text and both make the articles more scannable and “linked” to the Tages-Anzeiger website was wonderful. Here’s their description:
What’s that blue stuff? The idea is making the pages more scannable by using key words in blue. If you speak German you can actually read the front page in 20 seconds by flying over the blue key words. The idea is that if you type any of those key words on the website search, you will get a lit of articles in a chronological order about that subject. Links in print obviously doesn’t mean that you can click it, it means linking the paper to the online edition.
2:36 pm • 7 October 2009
From GOOD:
Each city is a collection of massive systems, all of which must interact seamlessly in order for the metropolis to function. This is a look at what makes up each of these systems. The numbers themselves are culled from New York, one of the world’s most quintessential cities, but they could be comparable to any urban center. From transportation to health care to the government itself, a city is only as good as the sum of its parts.
One thing I noticed is that there seems to be far fewer hospital beds given how many people are actually admitted…
9:01 am • 3 October 2009 • 13 notes
Last week, I threw together a chart showing the various articles I’d read that week broken down by category. I was tracking the same idea this week and thought it would be more interesting to compare the two weeks. This week, less architecture, more futurism…
3:46 pm • 2 October 2009 • 2 notes
A client recently asked me what I thought the key 3-5 metrics are that he should be focusing his Google Analytics reviews on. The following was essentially the answer I gave him:
I think that the most important metrics to track on a routine basis would vary depending upon the type of business, but for B2B service companies like ours and most of our clients, I’d list them as:
(1) Referrers, (2) Top Content and (3) Bounce Rate
Read More >
2:21 pm • 2 October 2009
I noted about 25 articles over the past week, and rather than describing each one, I thought I’d take a different approach and see if there were any overarching trends in subject matter. There were 6 random topics that did not recur, but also 2 or 3 that recurred quite a bit among the full list. I have 126 feeds in my Google Reader, so I’m used to seeing articles over a wide variety of categories, but the prevalence of articles about architecture and literacy-and-tech was unusual this week. It’s in the zeitgeist.
2:04 pm • 25 September 2009 • 2 notes
