RE: UKNM: ATTENTION: New Business People

[Matt Jones-ONLINE]

> If the project isn't going to have a jot of originality 

> involved then why 

> should we bother worrying about it ? If you are too lazy to spend 10 

> seconds with a pen and paper then what effort are you going 

> to put into 

> the project ?


hmm. interesting reactions.


for my money (and a lot of the bigger clients money, methinks) if "jot of

originality" =

spinny-slidey-rotating-vector-collegeproject-knock-off-sub-designersrepublic

-watchthetext-getbig-thensmallagain flash animation which seems to be the

norm for most design-led outfit's portfolio sites, then give me a bit of

HTML1.0 anyday.


The fact is, that I'd guess Clay is trying to build websites which achieve

something for his clients, whether it's buying something, getting to then

reading some info, whatever... objective-led sites. And in finding people

who understand how to design, build those, user-test them and make 'em

industrial-strength, he's pretty objective led too - i.e. he'd like to cut

and paste the phone number.


As i'm sure you know, (and have experienced yourself) the web makes people

impatient, makes people demand what they want when they want it - not just

experienced users like Clay but net novices like my 68 yr old iMac'd-up Dad,

who simply doesn't understand why people would want to make him wait a

minute and a half for a 20 second animation before finding the site doesn't

have anything he wants (probably because it was loaded with misleading

meta-tags to get it to the top of his fave search engine...) - the point

his, he's quite happy with "the usual staid html and gifs" if the design

work has been invested in the site to make it easy, quick and pleasurable to

*USE* for him.


Flash has it's place to be sure, but Clay arguement is not about

flash/html/dhtml/shockwave, or any of the other things that my dad (and

millions like him soon) don't give a flying f*ck about, it's about a product

being fit for it's use - people involved in the creation of digital media

should be focussed on that... hence, at the very least put your phone number

commented out in the HTML... ;-)


love,


Matt xxx


p.s. friend of mine was in paris last week at the macromedia conference and

saw flash4 being demo'd on a PDA (Pilot i think)... could the curse of

non-user-centred design spread to mobile applications soon....ARRRGH!!! ;-) 

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