Eric
Posts: 5740
Joined: 10/10/2003
From: Seattle, WA
Status: offline
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Niklas, I will certainly do what I can as we get closer to be as transparent as possible with the new design. We will be using the local to Seattle CellarTracker community for usability testing (apologies, we filled a our slots within a matter of minutes of me emailing the 485 people who have filled out their CellarTracker profile and list themselves in Washington State, Oregon, Vancouver and Victoria BC), but we may add a larger focus group or some way to gather feedback from all of the other locals who wanted to be involved. And of course, I recognize that there are thousands of people who are not local who might well want to see and provide feedback on the evolving designs. And so without trying to make my own life more difficult I do want to do what I can.
BTW, re-reading my very terse and flippant response to the original question, I can see why people are hopping in here with concern. I should have been more thoughtful and eloquent in the reply. The current CellarTracker UI, for btter or for sworse, has evolved to where it is largely organically as I have evolved the underlying functionality over the past 5 years. As is abundantly obvious, I am much more of a FUNCTION guy than a FORM guy, but there is a place for both. There are a billion things that I want to add to the site (and which so many of you haev asked for), but often the hardest challenge for me is "where to stick" the link. And so much of what I have added over time is undiscovered to so many of you. It amazes me how often people have no idea of the advanced search functionality that already exists. I know that can be exposed in ways to make it both more discoverable and easier to leverage for both the beginner and the advanced user.
Also keep in mind that there are really two very distinct constituencies of users on the site:
- Those who are interested in managing a cellar. We make up less than 10% of the population, yet the people using CellarTracker as a productivity tool are the lifeblood of the site. Trust me, as a guy who spent 15 years working on desktop productivity tools at Lotus and Microsoft, I will not lose sight of you. Keep in mind, I feel your pain. I am using this site to track nearly 4,000 bottles myself and depend on it daily. I can do a LOT better here in terms of visual appearance and productivity.
- A new and rapidly growing base of users are those who are almost exclusively browsing the site, looking for wine recommendations, looking to find people near them to trade and socialize with. Many of us who are tracking cellars also want to use the site this way. For this latter set of tasks, the site is a mess right now.
I like cake. I want my cake. I want to eat it to. I am working with some really, really bright people who do nothing but think about usability and design, meat and potatoes stuff. I need their help, as it is just too hard for me to rip away from the day to day of the site and how it has evolved to where it is. I have been working with them for a few months both to leverage their immense skills and their fresh perspective. One of the crucial building blocks of our process has been a disciplined attempt to do some research into who is using CellarTracker and who should be. We have broken these out into somewhat iconic personas so that as we design we are quite explicit about the different types of users, who we are prioritizing and de-prioritizing etc. But the personas will live long past this first attempt on a site resedign and will be a useful tool for generations of the site to come. The next focus is to identify key tasks by persona and very thoughtfully map out 'wireframes' and weigh the strengths and weaknesses of various designs. Then we will be usability testing these with people who match the various personas. Around February we should be wrapping up, and I will likely, for the first time, be hiring someone who really help me code this all up and leverage so much of the cool stuff that has come into being on the web. Serge, your calling out of Google is not lost on me. Early Google and Yahoo were best because of their simplicity, speed, and focus of design. In my own limited way I certainly want to embrace that, and I am certainly quite self conscious of my Microsoft roots and the good and bad things that brings with it.
Above all else, I am trying to be thoughtful and deliberate. I want the site to grow and evolve for decades to come. I have a ton of stuff still to do, and I need a UI framework that can contain this without collapsing under the weight of me tossing more crap around the edges of the screen. Function. Simplicity. Density. ****loads of data. Leveraging that and making it useful for you and the millions of other wine lovers out there. This is what I live by. Trust me.
_____________________________
Cheers!
-Eric LeVine
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