A leading photographer has written a stinging invective about Flickr’s failings, concluding that Google+ is looking a lot more like how the future should be. In a way, poor Flickr is yet another victim of the flailing catastrophe that is Yahoo – but what strikes me about the piece is how strongly emphasis is placed on ‘innovation’. I think he may have chosen slightly the wrong word. But then that would stand to reason, as hardly anyone seems to pay attention to the concept of user experience.
I am fairly sure that UX is the most underestimated element of digital marketing today, despite being essentially all that developers, in the broadest sense, ultimately aim to create. So much time and effort is put into features and testing that the actual feeling of using a piece of software gets lost.
I’m not referring here to design, which varies along the usual barometers ticking the boxes of kerning, whitespace, stylistic choices, visual interface and so on. That will always be recognised as being important, and you will find – at least on worthy projects – much attention being paid to the look and feel of a page. Sometimes unwelcome attention, but it must be said that good designers have never worked in a vacuum.
However, the rise of apps, with all the poking and prodding involved, has made apparent the need for a more comprehensive overview. The limited level of visual real estate means that devs no longer have the luxury of shoving columns and frames down the page or in to indicies. Things need to transition, pop over, shadowbox – pages within pages. We’re used to the concept of sitemaps, but apps have forced us to design as though we only have one, very important front page.
