Input Type Equals Huge
December 4th, 2005, By Duncan Gough
Web designers who don’t know what the w3c validator is for have always bugged me. One day, in my dreams, they’ll be as ridiculed as PHP developers who code with register_globals on, for example.
When I worked at UpMyStreet, I was introduced to the big and small font tags. Since then, it’s been gratifying to see how clear and semanticly rich designs are winning the war. There are plenty of reasons for this - FireFox, CSS over table-based layouts, the accessiblity buzz. Most of all, though, I think that developers and designers are beginning to understand how content on the web should be laid out. As the saying goes, the web is different to a magazine, so the presentation is starting to fall in with that idea.
The most startling example of this is rollyo. It’s taken me a while to really understand what it is that rollyo and sites like it are highlighting. Of course, looking at the home page of Millionsofgames and comparing it with rollyo, the answer is staring me in the face. Web 2.0 applications are complex - MOG, for example, is a games database that offers tagging, searching and sorting as well as being a games related pseudo-social-networking website. Rollyo, in comparison, is simple. Although the site might have as much data to offer as MOG does, it is layered behind the front page. Invite the user in via search, then reveal the metadata once the user is in, because the content, by that stage, is much more relevant.
It’s as if there was never any clear idea behind MOG (which is far from true - see these posts). What MOG needs, if I’m right about this, is a clearer front page - a list of games and a big search box. Input type equal huge, value equals search.
As Jeremy Zawodny recently explained, Web 2.0 is a triforce of ideas - bookmarking, interconnectedness and search. The key to the success of any Web 2.0 app, though, is the layering of those three ideas. In the case of MOG, now that we have more games in our database than an other games website on the web, our priorities should look like this - Search, Connect, Bookmark - since the most valuable data for us now is the cumulative Mogging of the same games over and over again. We need the community to start tagging the most popular games so that we can derive more information from them.
If you’re launching a new Web 2.0 application, however, then the order is different. More like Bookmark, Connect, Search, since there is little need for search when you database is so small. Design your home page with large type, icons and an clear interface for adding tags to your existing data. Create a simple, attractive form for adding new objects to your database. Focus on clarity - find out what you need for your site to be successful and design around that. Whilst it may sound obvious, Web 2.0 applications are becoming so complex that it can be hard to leave out some of the data that you have. More than ever, then, navigation and presentation are becoming key.