18 February 2009

For a while now I’ve been thinking about the general usability of the Dressed In Value website, and for the last several months I’ve been making minor tweaks here and there, all toward making it better as a whole. It’s not perfect by any means, not even close, but I wanted to point out a few things that I have done.

Get rid of stuff

These changes coincide pretty well with a recent article from A List Apart, In Defense of Readers by Mandy Brown. This part from the article rings most true to what I’ve been working on here:

If you want your users to skim the page, then by all means, fill the sidebar with content all the way down. But if you want them to read—if the page was written and not merely filled up, if the text consists of carefully crafted prose rather than bullet points—then respect the reading process and move that content elsewhere.

A while back, I started clearing out unnecessary visual stuff from the article screens. I can’t remember what prompted this exactly, but I’ve been thinking about the reading experience here, that there should be as few distractions possible. The biggest of these changes were removing the masthead and making the article title bigger. Here’s a before and after:

Because of Mandy’s text I quoted above, I’ve also removed an additional few things from the sidebar, leaving only what I deemed necessary: some descriptive text for those who may not be familiar with the site, and, for those curious, a list of monthly archive links to show that there’s more. Less stuff means less distractions means better focus. Here’s a before and after:

Add stuff

This hardly touches the tip of the iceberg, but because there has been some confusion about when an article was written, I’ve highlighted the published date on each article:

I’m not convinced it’s the best long-term solution, but it (hopefully) works for now.

And since comments aren’t had on Dressed In Value, yet I’d still like to generate some conversation, I’ve added this little bit to the end of each article:

Change the order of content under the hood

Some mostly-unseen changes I’ve made today are the order of the content in the markup. For example, the homepage loads the sidebar first, and then the main content. Until today, the same content flow was in order for the single article screens. I’ve changed it so that the article text comes first, and then the sidebar (secondary) content comes after it. This is beneficial for the unlikely but very possible user reading my site by aid of a screen reader.

The end

So, those are the major-minor things I’ve done around here. Hopefully they all help to make a better reading/using experience.

All of this work was mostly inspired by the seed planted from another ALA article, Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign by Cameron Moll.

As for the content itself, I’m still working on writing things that might be worthwhile.