I’ve just finished a complete design revamp of Simon Jaymes’s new website. He’s currently gearing up to release his new album and wanted a wordpress based site to make sure he has full control over his content. It’s all wired in to facebook and twitter and is good to go! Also started using mailchimp for his email campaigns which is proving a very nice tool indeed.

www.simonjaymes.com

In other news, Matt Barney and I are working on a new viral gaming wireframe for Toasted Digital, while I’m also on a new exciting media project with Leigh Jackson.

Work on my new website is underway… I’m not gonna give too much away, but here’s an early sketch of what’s in store. The site will be Actionscript 3.0 and feature artwork and 3D imagery.

Interface feedback is one of the most important parts of designing any interface, be it a basic website or a fully-blown desktop application. With it, users know exactly what’s going on in front of them. Without it, users are lost and confused.

But what IS interface feedback? The easiest way to understand interface feedback is to see it at work. Take a look at the two links below… 

Which of the two links above did you instantly recognise as a link? The second one, no doubt. The design of the link made it instantly and completely obvious what its purpose was, whereas the first link gave no indication that it was anything other than page text.

Interface feedback isn’t limited to design and simply making features stand out, though. A huge part of interface feedback is pointing the user in the right direction. Take the following example…

A huge chunk of time spent on the above online image editor went towards making sure that interface feedback was plentiful and consistent across the GUI. Notice the following pieces of feedback from this one simple example:

• The “BACKGROUND” button changing hue when the mouse cursor is above it, letting the user know that it can be clicked to create an effect
• The dragging box around the text on the stage, letting the user know that the text is selected
• The blue glow of the currently selected layer on the Layers Panel, letting the user know straight away which layer is selected

While interface feedback is obviously crucial to a successful interface, it often gets overlooked in the pursuit of artistic creativity. Ever been to a website that took your breath away with its flashy graphics, but you had no idea how to use it? That’s something that you want to avoid at all costs, so making sure that interface feedback is part of your design plan is crucial.

Thankfully, it’s entirely possible (and bordering on simple) to combine a great artistic look with fantastic interface feedback.

Keep interface feedback in mind when creating any sort of interface, and your users will be rewarded with a great user experience.

I’ve just finished working on a game for NESTA with Pixillion Digital and Tijuana Design. The game was a different challenge to the virals I’ve been working on recently, with it having multiple levels and characters, as well as a highscore table powered by a MySQL database. There was also a lot of drawing to be done, many many animals.

Check it out at http://www.pixillion.com/adaptation/adaptation.html

Without doubt, one of the most annoying parts of web design is making sure your website looks as nice in one browser as it does in another, and as all developers know, this takes time. It specifically takes a lot more time when having to test in IE6, which has no real accessible way to do so without using other or virtual machines.

So in comes the rather overwhelmingly named “Expression Web SuperPreview” from Microsoft. A stand-alone visual debugging tool, which lets you flick between and even onion-skin different versions of Internet Explorer. With the full release there’s promise of inclusion of other browsers you’ve installed locally such as Firefox and Safari, creating potentially a great cross browser testing tool.

You can download the preview version by clicking here.

The full version will be bundled with Expression Web 3 later on in the year, here’s hoping it delivers and helps ease that cross browser headache…