cre8d design

Mena Trott recently said that one of the biggest challenges for blog design is keeping them uncluttered. I’ve been thinking about this for some time and have been reflecting on 37 Signal’s post entitled “It just doesn’t matter”. In the post Jason writes in response to questions about Campfire:

“Why time stamps every 5 minutes? Why not time stamp every chat line?” Answer: It just doesn’t matter. How often do you need to track a conversation by the second or even the minute? Certainly not 95% of the time. 5 minute stamps are sufficient because anything more specific just doesn’t matter.

I’ve been wondering about blog posts: Are time stamps necessary for every single post, comment, trackback and pingback?

I’ve been re-working the design here (this blog is an ongoing test bed for ideas and is often a little messy as I try different things out) and I’m experimenting with removing some of the time stamps to see if I miss them, if they’re needed.

Here’s my theory which I’m trying out here right now:

• Individual entry archives should have a post date; they’ve been archived.
• The home page should have freshness information – show how long it’s been since you last posted. Keep it simple by only showing one lot of units (if it’s less than an hour, display the number of minutes ago, if it’s less than a day display the number of hours ago etc).
• Comments don’t each need timestamps on them. Optionally show the freshness of last comment – i.e. time since the last comment.

Have I lost valuable information by removing all these timestamps?

Things I’m not so sure on…

Why on earth is there an “R” standing for Thursday on the Feed Stats Dashboard graph? Never heard of the letter R standing for Thursday before.

I’m also wondering why “Uncommon uses” has been given such prominence… if it’s a rare thing. Maybe stuff like this could be hidden unless you happen to have an “uncommon use” of your feed. New features are all nice and good but sometimes I don’t think it’s necessary to show everything and approach it more from a need-to-show basis.

The title “Show stats for 1 day” is a little misleading – it’s showing the stats for the last 30 days but is highlighting one day’s stats. At first, I thought I was seeing hourly stats. I don’t think theres any advantage having “Show stats for 1 day” as well as “Show stats for the last 30 days” – it would be simpler just to have the stats for the last 30 days of the two.

Things I like…

I love that they show what paid-features look like and how they partially fade out demos. At a glance I can see what I’m missing out on, without having the features explained in detail.

I like their quirkly little messages. The service feels more personal.

Things I’d like…

Stats to be a little more than just graphs and tables. For example, simple figures such as subscriber growth rate would be handy. It would be fun to model the subscriber growth rate, and then do some simple predictions – for example: estimates of how long it will be before your feed reaches x subscribers.

Logahead – a new blogging tool by a 17 year old – has created quite a buzz and rightly so. Let me try and avoid using buzzwords in this post and say what it does well:

• Easy to add and edit everything inline, rather than going into an admin area.
• Simple to organise the sidebar content. Reminds me of how Typepad made it simpler than MovableType to organise the sidebar by moving sections up and down but this makes it far simpler again by allowing you to drag and drop sidebar content. No coding involved.
• Built in tagging and tag clouds. No plugins necessary.

As far as I can see, it’s not possible to edit templates online at all – which is rather frustrating. I’m sure Logahead has given the WordPress and MovableType crowds a bit of a jolt and reminder that blogging tools still have a lot of room for core usability improvement and not everything is about fancy plugins.