Redesign SpSh Home 2009 Overview

thanks for the details!
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Hi All,

I realise it's late to weigh in on this. Personally out of Stacey's I like #1 the best, I think it draws me right to the 5 icons showing what we do. I'd rather look at these pics than read text ..when surfing the net I dont read a lot.
I still like Erin's the best though out of all the designs.

I think a big question we need to resolve is, Who is more important: festivals or conferences?
...if we go Erin's route we get a fun site that festival people will want to use; if we go Stacey's route we get a professional site that is more conference focussed. Or maybe we can find a middle way.

So does this mean we're not using http://greeneventsguide.org/spaceshare/? I was a little confused by all the redesigns... I actually liked the layout at http://greeneventsguide.org/spaceshare/, though I also like Jeff's redesign of Erin's layout.

Some very basic issues:

• We have three sections: What we do, Why We Do It, and Customized for/with You. These aren't clearly ordered in the logical set & order in the designs.The new designs head away from, rather than focusing in on, the 1-2-3 flow of our most important points. These designs often mix sections together. "Conference Planner, Festival Planner, Demo" is not the right set.
• Cathal as a traveler headed to the "What we do" instead of the travelers section on multiple designs

Stacey, questions:
• Why did you find new images instead of using our icons?

Designs Stacey 1-4

For almost all the designs:
a. Design: It's very busy with photographs. The images kindof crash.
b. UI/Function: It makes "Share a Ride" seem like something to click on, and "Conference Planners" kindof disappears, and is logically grouped with the demos and such.

• 3 & 4 seem cramped -- we have a lot to explain, they don't have the space for text.
• all designs but #2 people are going to click on the "What we do" images, but those aren't intended as individual links... plus they have to "back up" to go from what we do, to how we will do it for their event.
• 3 This seems like a more nicely integrated design, cleaner: I like that some characteristics are photos, others drawn.
• 1 & 4 have photo overload -- to many photos that don't carry a similar message too close to each other
• 3 fails to re-direct travelers completely. The others don't emphasize it quite as much as I'd like.
• If we're going to use photos, they must be of people sharing (not one person in a car or room). In general I'm not a fan of lots of images that don't have a clear, instant message. It's harder for SpaceShare: on Gray Davis's site, the site is partly about people, so you put up photos of the people and the site makes sense.

What I'd like to see:

• I'd like some branding elements. There is very little of this in Stacey's designs. The Community site itself does some with it, half ok, with little logos near the titles. I like the idea of corners cut at the same angle as our logo. Does anyone else, or disagree?
• I'd like to see "what we do" flow into "who we do it for" and cause people to first understand the basics of what we do, then understand why they want it, and have the button to click (festival or conference) right there.
• Maybe less squares: I kindof like the little circles for things like "View Demo". Perhaps we could use diamond images puzzled-together for the "What we do" --> visually connect them into groups. (In general we're not doing much with visual imagery integrating into UI and message ... I think if we don't have the skills/photos to do it right, we should back off and use more text.)
• The images are not clear enough for small-font on things like "Conference Planners" or "View a Demo" --> People are going to be looking at a whole lot of images of this and that, rather than narrowing down quickly. There is not enough skim-ability.

Hi Everyone,
I've been thinking alot about how to respond to all of the different website options. I have to agree with Cathal in that I do like my design the most, and jeff's version of it second. It's not because I made it, but because I like color and creativity and the site seems more personalized in communicating what spaceshare is about- new idea, creative approach to problem solving, useful, easy to work with. If we were to go with my site, I would also recommend that things get shifted, that it is more utilitarian, better allocation of space, etc. In terms of the information presented on my page vs stacey's all of the same information and menus are there. From a festival planner's perspective I find mine and jeff's pages the quickest for connecting me with what I'm looking for.

In general I find Stacey's designs very standardized and heavy on boxes and icons. The sites seem impersonal. Too much compartmentalization.

From a festival planner's perspective I find getting to the button a bit of a search. One image one my eye is initially drawn to the "green travels" and "networking and web" sections and then I have to look around a bit before I find my link. On image 2 I initially look at the "green events are better events" text, then my eye goes to the "green travels" and "networking and web" sections on the left, then I have to find my link on the top. In image 3 my eye travels first from the image of the people walking in front of the building, then downward to the menu bar, further down to the icons, then the text and then I have to look around for my link for festival planners. In image 4 I first look at the grand central image with the logo then to the right to the conference planners festival planners, etc icons- this is the easiest for me to find what I'm looking for.

In general I'm not crazy about most of the images (stock photos) used in stacey's designs- I especially don't like the grand central station image of people dispersed. In general in images 1,3,4 I feel like the sites seems comprable to orbitz.com or expedia.com- cheap travel search engines. Which we are not. On image two I like the left hand menu for green travel and networking. I don't like image one much at all. I feel like I forget to look at the logo of spaceshare about the site, which means people would forget us. In image 3 I like the black and white drawing on the top of the page but I don't feel like it has much to do with spaceshare which is more focussed on transportation. I don't really like the rest of the layout. I like image 4 the most but I don't like the icons and photos used, I just like the composition, the movement of my eye around the site.

Back to my design: in regards to stephens comments
* maintenance (what if we have one more video?),
--we could allocate more space to videos or put them on a seperate page

* difficulty in creating drop-down menus. There's too little information on this page compared to what we need. Maybe we can design our own drop downs by hand from the circular menu, but that's a lot of work.
--- I had thought of the center section or the are where the text is below the circular menu as a section where the menus would appear.

* too many styles, too many fonts. Our logo, the hippy car, the circles, the arrows --> it's just too much. (Might be just intended as an experiment-doc like mine?)
--- there is only one font on the page- helvetica, it's just in different sizes. We can ditch the hippy car. I like the arrows, but they were just experimental, we could look at other options for those menus

* Don't like the arrows. Even with a new graphic, the tendency of separation and spreading is distracting.
---I like arrows but I'm not married to them, all they are is dust in the wind (repetative whistling in the background)

* There is a loss of information: I think the "Green Travel" and other categories are important.
--- these could be easily added in

* the need to have two completely different templates (can't use this design for the regular pages.),
--- I had thought of the other pages as having a slightly different template- I like what jeff did or we could do something similar but different.

* lack of orderliness getting people confused -> it leans towards everyone clicking the demo, which isn't a good first step.
--- that's probably the fault of the arrows, we would just have to decide what is the first thing people click on

* I really don't like the hippy car added as a minor component... there's too many pseudo-logos on the page.
--- let's ditch the hippy car

So those are all my comments. I hope they're helpful.
take care
Erin

Hi, great work guys. Out of them all, I perfer Erin's design. It caught my eye because it looks very original and exciting. Stacey's designs are well laid out but are so similar to loads of other websites that they don't make you feel like your dealing with real people. As a traveller, with both Erin's and Stacey's designs, I see the link I'm looking for (share a ride) very quickly. With Jeff's, I don't. Replacing the arrows with the grey box doesn't work.

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Stephen adds:

This is a real problem with the designs, since that is not the right link.

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A few tweaks would improve Erin's design like standardising the fonts, getting rid of the hippy car and adding a subtitle under spaceshare and a GEG link.

I don't see the point of the planners and travellers links. Are those things already covered? We should either have them or the share ride and room and conference and festival planner links.

That's all for now. Cathal.

Summary: I prefer Design 2 and Design 3.

Design 1: For the first design, for some reason, I FELT like there were too many images (which is a little strange since the 3rd design has the same amoun but I didn't feel like there were that many). Maybe it's because Green Travels and Networking & Web take up two lines. Also, the SpaceShare logo doesn't fit very well with the design (I did not even see it at first).

Design 2: I liked the fact that you could see all of the information on your screen (no scrolling to see the rest of the writing). Unfortunately, it doesn't contain all of the menu options (Travelers, Event Planners). Also, there are two places that have the word "Explore" (not really significant, but I thought I should mention it).

Design 3: I like this design. I like this particular way of separating the different menus and their images into their own clusters. Also, what will happen if the quotes are longer?

For Designs 3 and 4, I don't think that the background of when the text begins should be that light shade of green. I think it looks weird that the colored background begins below the Green Travels and Networking & Web menu.

Design 4: I don't really like having the picture of the people walking with SpaceShare's logo over that and the quote on the bottom left of the picture.

Also, I was wondering why the SpaceShare was black and white and there was no green? I feel that for Designs 1 and 2, green being incorporated into the logo for SpaceShare would work better.

I sort of don't understand why we have two more buttons for Festival Planners and Conference Planners if we already have Planners in the menu. But I amk guessing that it's because those are the two main types of people who would use SpaceShare.

I am a little worried that there are too many colorful images. I don't know if that really is an issue though.

For Green Travels and Networking & Web menu, I like the icons better than the images (the images were used in Design 2).

I was wondering, will the Green Travel and Networking & Web menu stay where it is when the visitor goes to other pages? If it does stay, then Design 2 works really well because that menu looks more integrated into the design.

Agreed - I lost many of headings and info disappeared as the design evolved - and we should all watch for this, as Stephen has mentioned we went in circles with the GEG for the same reason.

I do think we need to balance the need to include a lot of info with the need to make a site that looks good and attracts users.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:
I think we can add another bubble for Travelers on the homepage. If we use drop-down menus, maybe all the menu content ie {get involved, custom tech, newletter, etc} can all fit into 1 menu?..?? Also, there is room for more small bubbles under the menu to highlight important sections.

The old school buggy on the bottom right with the "contact us" over it was fine in Stacie's design, but I think it looks out of place in Erin's design.

Regarding Jeff's edits to Erin's design, would it be disorienting for the user to click a link and experience a slightly different layout? Where does the menu go?

It's not an absolute requirement, but I like the idea of using and reusing the little icons for carpooling and so on throughout both this site and the actual sharing-sites.

I like the "View a Demo" and such being smaller, the circles are nice... we're not losing key information while creating some extra whitespace. May not work well for quotes, which will often be longer. We are planning to put a different quote on every page. I might even have a different quote pop up as you mouse-over the different functions: under Green Travel, under Carpool, up comes a quote specific for carpooling.

There are going to be cramping issues when we add things like menus, that obviously need to be on every page, to the airy designs.

Packing more meaning into the graphics would be very powerful... I think when we're done, it will matter less whether we use two or three columns, circles or angles, then whether the images are both attractive and explanative.

I like the way the left and right menu look. I was wondering if maybe the left side should be more direct and say that SpaceShare provides these tools instead of the indirect way it implies that SpaceShare provides the tools.

I do not think the quote bubble at the top right should have the person's name jut out of the bubble. I think it would be better to just have a rectangular bubble or to not have a bubble at all.

Maybe the blurb pop-out about the GEG should be shorter. Also, I was not sure who you were referring to as "event greeners."
Here is my shortened version: We believe in the broad movement to green events. The Green Events Guide is a great resource for aspects of greening outside our area of focus.

-Sherry