Sometimes I come across a site and have to wonder what the designers, consultants, marketers, management teams and everyone else involved were thinking when they signed off on the project. The sting is that much worse when it’s a re-design of a well-loved site.

Well, the brains behind the new BBC iPlayer layout have failed, miserably! The new design is cluttered and lacks the wonderful functionality of the older sidebar. Its ease of use is completely gone in favour of… something? I have no idea what benefit the new layout brings. There is no additional feature set. It doesn’t DO anything different.

I have two major concerns with it:

1. It’s cluttered.

The benefit of the original iPlayer was an ease of use and elegant design. It was simple to find a programme, easy to play it, and easy to find related content. They have now juxtaposed radio and television programming, littered the screen with unfathomable boxes, and made the filtering by category bloody difficult. Its main content doesn’t fit above the fold, making its screen real-estate poorly-used even though there is much more content on display at one time. The wonderfully-simple method of sidebar filtering is gone in favour of some myspace-esque scatter-box setup. It’s complicated, un-elegant, and supremely difficult to use.

Poor effort, badly done.

2. It’s ugly. I know this is subjective, but the actual player doesn’t fit well in its space.

Image by . SantiMB . (too busy) via Flickr

I grew up in a Mac family. My dad used to programme accounts recievable applications on an old, black and white Macintosh, and that was my first encounter with any sort of GUI. Since then, I’ve used both Mac’s and PC’s and have a MacBook for work and a poorly-running, but still brand-new Vista box in my home study. I’ve even dabbled with Linux several times.

However, I’m starting to realise something: an aweful lot of applications (on every platform) get aesthetics completely wrong.

There’s a balance between looking nice, feeling comfortable, and aiding use. I think that the appearance of an application is as important a part of the design as the application itself. It’s a part of the usability, it’s not ‘eye candy’ slapped on for gratuitous reasons.

This is something Mac’s understand, and their GUI is gorgeous. Vista’s pretty good-looking itself, but that’s it’s problem: that’s all it is. The operating system is huge, heavy, slow and unpredictible. It crashes, hangs, and takes minutes to load. I bought a brand new (though admittedly budget-conscious PC) from a manufacturer who shall remain nameless (cough! Dell! cough…) which barely runs just the OS. I’ve had to triple the RAM and will be re-installing this weekend.

So, what Can I do about it? I can switch Aero off… leaving me with a huge, heavy, unpredictable and slightly-less-slow OS which is now ugly. So there’s Vista, tipping in the balance with an “eye candy” approach at aesthetic design.

I see the visual layout, graphics, and overall presence of an application as part of it’s feature-set.

I read about sliderocket over on R/WW, and at ZDNet, today, and signed up for a Beta. While I’m waiting for them to send one out (I hope) I’d like to talk a little about why I love the idea of this product.

Firstly, I was recently tasked with conducting a 40-minute presentation. This is something I was quite excited to do, since it was about the Semantic Web, but I didn’t have any presentation software on my PC. I downloaded a copy of OpenOffice, which has a presentation application built in, and found it ironically bland for an app called ‘Impress’. I know, as a person of geekish persuasion (I’m only half-geek, on my father’s side) I shouldn’t give a toss about what an application looks like, but should focus entirely on what it does and how well. But this is a presentation–aesthetics is what the software was written for. I’m not crunching numbers or writing code, I’m standing up in front of people discussing an exciting topic, trying to put forward a well-polished talk. I want my slides to reflect that–they need to add to the talk, and they can’t do that if they’re boring.

Not only this, but I find OpenOffice’s Impress seemed to have loads of options in random places, and a difficult-to-follow system of preferences. It has dozens of background settings, but it’s like pulling teeth to get a gradient you like.

Eventually, I downloaded a trial of Microsoft’s Powerpoint 2007 and found it much, much better. It’s easy to use, simple-to-navigate, and aesthetically pleasing. It’s huge downside, however, is that it’s expensive.

Well, most personal sites have a bio written in the third person: “So and so was born to be famous…” I suppose this either means that that person happens to be is either famous/rich enough to have someone write for them, or they are just pretending to be rich/famous enough to have someone write for them. I am not rich/famous, and no one will write my bio page, and I don’t want to appear pretentious — it just comes out that way…

I was born in Colorado in 1984. I grew up not far west of Pueblo in a strange community called Pueblo West. It’s a sort of, ‘We’re not actually Pueblo’ community. ‘We can’t pronounce it like real Puebloans can.’ Unfortunately for my parents, I wasn’t meant to live in the desert, so raising me must have been difficult. I spent most of my time pretending to be somewhere green and pleasant, which is why I now reside in England. (That and the English wife, I suppose.) A lot of the fuel for this green, rainy world came from a powerful love of reading which my parents both instilled in me through the simple means of both loving books. By the time I was ten, I was always waiting for my folks to finish their latest books, so I could get on with whichever series it happened to be. (They seemed to think it fair that they — having bought the books — got to read them first). Colorado, for my English reader, is a state roughly the size of the UK and is half mountains and half wasteland.

Live Writer

Right, so I’ve been blogging using Windows Live Writer for a few weeks, and have generally enjoyed it. It’s easier than logging into my CMS, and it integrates with the site theme, so what I see is actually what the post looks like.

As you can see, it’s a pretty slick interface, and I think it’s  relatively simple, so the focus is on the writing rather than the application (Windows’ biggest design fault IMHO!) There are a few exasperatives, however:

• Insert Video only works with a select set of video sources, and I even had trouble with YouTube. It’s a slick idea, but it executes poorly.
• My Site favicon appears, which is nice, but it runs over ‘View Weblog’ and falls off the bottom of the window. Surely it’s not too hard to resize or align it in a satisfactory way?
• Set-up was quick, but there’s no native support for Drupal (you have to cheat and call it WordPress or MetaWebLog). This isn’t so bad, but it does limit the options you’re given if you choose the wrong one.
• It has the ability to tag posts, but it calls them ‘Categories’. They’re Tags. It’s a Blog. And, it’s one of the things that doesn’t work if you choose the wrong set-up type.

Aside from those, it’s brilliant. I use it all the time, and it is easy to use. You just have to html-in the videos you want.

I just watched the most unhelpful but beautifully-shot promotional video for the new Sony Ericsson XPERIA. I assume it’s a mobile phone from the five-second glimpse you get of it. The rest of the video is a bit of a mystery. It’s very enjoyable to watch, so I’d recommend it. It’s got lots of paper aeroplanes flying around NYC, with a Mystery Tour song going round.

In seriousness, I read a review on Last 100 about it, but they were baffled by the marketing speak too…

The EXPERIA X1, available in the second half of 2008, is a “premium experience of energized communication”, whatever that means.

It looks fun, and I can’t wait to see what it will do; but I can’t say I don’t feel a bit sad that it’s Windows Mobile. The limited experience I’ve had with WinMobiles has been poor, really. I don’t really want my mobile phone to pause and hang like my PC does… However, I love Sony’s hardware, and this looks rather fun…