PICnet Blog

In the tech world, maybe money doesn’t buy power — at least, it can’t buy good CSS practices. Or so it would seem, at least, after today’s fabulously botched launch of Walmart’s new online video store.

See what we mean? Visit this site in Internet Explorer:

http://www.walmart.com/videodownloads

Now, do the same thing in Firefox. And in case the web site has been changed by the time you read this post, here’s what the site looked like in Firefox browsers at 6:30 tonight:

No, you’re not dreaming. It’s really that bad.

This is a CSS issue, and it will probably be fixed in a few hours. But it still goes to show you that no matter how many high-faultin’ movie studios you partner with, none of it matters if you don’t get the right company to develop your web site.

Update at 6am PDT on 2/8/07: If you dare to visit the site using a browser other than Internet Explorer, you get this fun message: “Unsupported Browser…We’re sorry…Our website requires the browser Internet Explorer version 6 or higher. It appears that you are using Firefox, Safari, or another browser that Wal-Mart Video Downloads doesn’t currently support. Click here to get Internet Explorer for free from Microsoft.”

During the Web development process, one of the most important phases of work is the information architecture. In laymen’s terms, the outline of the site. Of course, this phase doesn’t get the glory of the more glamorous work, like design mockups and development iterations.

One reason why this phase is often lower on organization’s radars is that it’s just not that much fun. It seems, however, that we might have a contender that could make this process a lot more, well, bubbly.

Bubbl.us is a new Web based mind-mapping tool that we think might have some traction in the Web development world. The goal is to make it easy to develop bubble-like outlines of systems, with an easy to use interface. The system is still a little buggy, but it’s just in beta, as is everything else these days. Lots of Flash makes me worry a little bit about its extendability (would like it if you could export these mind-maps into text documents).

Definitely worth a look.

Our friends across the pond at the BBC have put together a very nice, concise list of best Web practices they are putting into motion to make their Web presence even better. I think there’s a lot that non-profit organizations can take from their list, especially in this Web 2.0 world we’re supposedly living in now, including:

• Treat the entire web as a creative canvas
• The very best websites do one thing really, really well
• Any website is only as good as its worst page

I think that if most organizations even took 5 of their top 15 items to heart, we’d see a more informative, clean, and organized collective Web presence in our NPO community.

In nearly every project and product we develop at PICnet, I constantly ask one question that likely annoys our team more than a day working under Steve Jobs: “can’t you make it more intuitive?”

Note that I don’t say, “can you dumb it down so that a banana slug, without so much as an opposable thumb or high-speed Internet access, can still work this?”

That’s an important difference. Not the banana slug part, but the idea that dumbing down technology for the sake of simplicity should not be a goal we strive to achieve. Instead, I’m happy to see that like-minded people like Dan over at Adaptive Path feel the same way. In his posting entitled Strive for Elegance, not Simplicity, Dan lays out his thoughts on this matter, and focuses on elegance in his designs rather than simplicity.

Rather than simplicity, I try to make my designs elegant, which is something different. As I’ve noted before, simplicity can remove something precious from users: control. Users sometimes prefer having more complexity because it can sometimes provide users with more control. Even if, as Norman rightly notes, users don’t use the controls, there is something about having them that is comforting.

As our clients have seen, and the world will see when we release Soapbox Events, we’re constantly striving to make sure that our offerings are both simple and utilitarian, with a splash of eye candy design. This makes sure our clients have both ease-of-use and control, which to be honest, is quite a challenge. Stay tuned, and challenge the developers…and designers. Neither is always right.

If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a color-picker. Ask my co-workers, ask my girlfriend. I’m just not good with matching colors.

Thankfully, life has been made much better for the color-impaired like myself now that Adobe has released Kuler.

Essentially, Kuler is your online interior decorator, multiplied by 1,620 (the current number of users submitting color sets). Let’s say you’re looking to bring some winter color themes to your Web site, but have no idea what colors to choose. Just go to the Kuler site, search for “winter”, and viola, you’ll find 25 user-submitted color palettes for your winter blues.

Color match, crossed with ease-of-use, crossed with user-generated color palettes equal happy wannabe design gurus.