We were working on some general designs and ideas for the site today. One thing we worked on was all the different sections of the site and how our basic navigation would work. Nothing with too much detail, just some kind of general ideas. For example, these wonderful boxes represent the possible destinations from the home page of the store. (we could have used paper/pen, but I can never understand it afterwards.)

A graphical representation of the ordered list to the right.

Store Specific Shirt Page Save the world Login/userinfo forum blog

The sizes of the boxes are supposed to represent the importance of the destination from the current location. For example, it is much more important that someone be led to a page for a specific shirt than to go to our blog. (The ‘Save the World’ link is quite interesting, and we’ll post about our goals with that some time later.)

These boxes are so simple that it doesn’t seem like they would be very helpful in actually designing the look and feel of a site. I think it’s useful however because it symbolizes what my goals are for a specific page. Lets say for example that I’m having a tough time making my main menu look good and function perfectly because I have too many things in there. I might think it’s really important for the blog link to be there and just not want to get rid of it. But if I understand the priority of people being able to browse for shirts super easily, it should be easy to see that the blog link isn’t really necessary in such a prominent place if it can’t be made to work well.

Just listing those same pages in order of importance wouldn’t help me understand my real feelings when comparing two items, but looking at the size of the boxes next to each other makes it quite clear how I feel about the two pages. So doing something like this really helps me to understand what I already think is important and to apply that as I design something.

I really enjoy seeing how others work and think because there is always something I can pick up from them that will help me be a better designer and thinker. So what are some of the things that you do when working on a design?

30 Day Highlight

One of the other 30 day projects has piqued my interest. The idea is to help people to go running by making it a little competitive. Kind of an online running community. Being a currently quite lax runner myself I like the idea of something to give me a little push to get out the door. Here is the Runimal Blog.

They also posted about doing a project as they learn Ruby on Rails. I am in the same situation in regards to learning RoR, and was considering posting my own similar views on the topic but they seemed to voice the topic quite well so I’ll just point you to them.