The life, work and thoughts of Bence Kucsan - There are 0 new posts and 0 new comments since Your last visit
Visiting Dave Shea’s recently redesigned Mezzoblue yesterday drove my attention to the evident need of link styling, which I had on my ToDo list, even so I somehow managed to forget it. Till now!
Yes, I'm just back from the battle against the mean
"Have I already seen this or should I click it?" feeling, which was
here to destroy user experience. Did I win? Well, time and YOU will decide it.
Navigation design is one of the most important factors of usability. The understanding of where I am now, where I have been and where can I go keeps visitors from getting lost, which is often the case by today’s huge mass of content generated daily. I’m not the first and sure not the last who thinks about the importance of styling visited links. Jakob Nielsen sees this as one of the oldest usability issue for example, Mike Davidson made it radical and Dan Cederholm started a conversation concerning the topic, just to mention a few.
Styling visited elements
The idea to actually take a little step further and use the visited status idea for blog entries the user have read is not a new one in my mind, but the last push was given me yesterday, when visiting Dave Shea’s recently redesigned Mezzoblue. The site’s layout allows you the see the 6 newest entries even if you’re on a deeper page.
www.mezzoblue.com ↑ With a really - and with really I mean a really-really - easy step (adding some greyness to the a:visited) Dave made sure, that his visitors are realizing immediately if there is new content on the site, because it shows up white. This is a quiet handy feature of his site, not to mention the other great details of his redesign, but we don’t want to get off-topic, do we?
Styling visited elements in the broadest sense
As mentioned this gave me the last inspirational push to develop a way to visualize the process of reading yourself through on this site. As I use big 280 x 155 pixel areas to present an entry - except on the archives page, becouse of the amount of content they wouldn’t fit - I don’t wanted to tweak the title, more the box itself, because forms and colors are faster realized by human eyes than text.
www.svenigson.com ↑ As the result you can easily recognize at first sight which entry is new and which you have already read. Hope you like and find your way easier through the site!
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Very interesting method you have implemented here Bence.
You know, while initially glancing over your homepage I became quite confused as to what I was looking at, but after going back now, I really like it. I like the fact that each article’s link occupies a large chunk of screen real estate. Perhaps I was initially confused because it’s a very unconventional method. I do think it’s cool though.
It would look even better if you tried to include an image of some sort with every post, to give each article on the main page a little more individuality.
Good luck mate.
@ Matt - And that’s exactly what my goal was. Present entries in an unconventional way, and I’m glad You like! My original idea was to have small teaser pictures to every entry, but after implementing it became a bit messy though. Not to mention loading time and bandwidth consume, You know. The site is already a very bad bandwidth-eater, must admit…
@ Mikey - Well, I love them as any of the great sites and it’s designers. True. Still, thank You, there is more coming!
Getting back on topic, I do feel that the styles for read and unread items on your front page are confusing. Well, at least to me at first glance. To me the items with a lighter background attract my attention, while those are the ones I’ve already read.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to give unread items a grayed out style?
That aside, the style you have going on here is insane. I see a *lot* of site, but this just jumps out.
@ Martin - And if You knew how long I’m tweaking on this issue… Some of the changes I did live today afternoon, so if some of You experienced strange behavior while browsing, well exactly that’s what the reason was.
OK, Kevin here we go! Background new entry and background visited entry. It works on all available browsers out there, tested. Especially on XP and FF combo, it’s my standard too, but not for long anymore…
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