Alright, so we already have a design that I’ve said that I liked. Why ae we back here with yet another design? The answer is simple: I still don’t have enough to do with my life. Aside from that, I have found Mr. Martin Belam’s most recent entry on the reboot blog inspiring in some sense.

One of the areas that comp 3 was lacking in was search (it was also browse, but we will get to that later). I had the standard search bar, but I removed one of the few items that followed the whole “wisdom of crowds” theory in the current design of the site. Today, it makes a triumphant return.

You will notice a blue bar under the news breakout I designed. Within this bar is a split up search box that has everything the current search has. You will also notice the A-Z index added under browse. This is the inspiration I was speaking of.

By including the A-Z widget right there with search, I was able to remove the old blue sidebar. With that content gone, I changed the “My BBC” panel to a three-column layout. This enhances the usefulness of the homepage as a portal.

Functionality-wise, only a small handful of changes have been made. Most of these are designed to improve usability within the system. First, the personalized greeting and login options have been moved down to the MyBBC panel. Even with the news breakout being modifiable, the most cutom content will be within the My BBC panel. Therefore, the user will see a logical connection between the two.

Next to the greeting, there is a “change this” link. In the third mock up, this link was in most of the individual widgets. Now, it will point to a specific page that will act as the customization engine. As my design relies on this link, my next mock up will be of that page.

On a more personal note, my underemployment does seem to be drawing to a close, and I will probably be forced to enter just the image mockups of both this page and the “change this” page. I don’t expect this to be a problem, but I do wish I could have had the time to actually create the XHTML shell of the site.

Maybe next time…

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 10:22 am and is filed under Writings, web2.0, simplicity, programming, design, reboot:bbc, xhtml. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.