something in the way

The team at Wyld Stallyons have just created a stunningly beautiful campaign video for the WWF.

Tomorrow starts the construction of the architectural installion “Pike Loop” at the Storefront of Art and Architecture (New York), together with the opening of the exhibition of the work of Swiss architects Gramazio & Kohler on Architecture and Digital Fabrication. Gramazio & Kohler shipped R-O-B, their Mobile Fabrication Unit robot, to New York to build Pike Loop, a 22m long structure built from bricks.
I would really like to see these kind of fabrication techniques to be used more often, they definitely offer new possibilities to architecture and design.

This is a photo of another design called “Structural Oscillations”, it should give you an idea how Pike Loop could look like when it’s finished.

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg pack a lot of theory about the psychology of persuasion into the concept of a “call-to-action”, but at its simplest, a call-to-action is the area on a page that sums up its main purpose or goal – i.e. the bit that the designer wants the user to read and click on. A good call-to-action is one that’s rapidly noticed and easily comprehended. A bad one… Well, just take a look below. It’s rare to find a site that makes the same fundamental mistake over and over again like this.

Above is a screengrab from theacropolismuseum.gr, the site for the new Acropolis museum in Athens. It opened this year, and it’s turned out to be a very popular tourist attraction. With that in mind, it makes sense to book your tickets in advance. It’s not too hard to find this page (Hours & Ticketing), but the next step is to enter the ticket booking process. So, how do you do that? It’s almost like they’ve hidden the “Buy Tickets” call-to-action on purpose, as a nondescript link right at the bottom of the page. This is the online equivalent of designing a supermarket with the tills hidden in the stockroom – hardly the definition of good business sense.

Having clicked ‘Buy Tickets’, the user ends up here (above), which seems to be the first page of the booking process. The only thing we can see here is a text field. Where’s the rest of the stuff? Where’s the ‘next’ button? Where’s the steps-left indicator? It almost looks broken – as if the page hasn’t loaded properly. In fact, to proceed to the next step the user needs to enter a number into the text field, and then the next chunk of the form will suddenly be revealed. You can almost picture the user muttering to themselves – “Why on earth does this site have to work differently to the rest of the web?”

Having entered the number of tickets, this calendar widget appears (above). Today’s date is currently selected. What are you expected to do now? Once again, there is no clear call-to-action. In fact, you have to click any date in the future and it will reveal which times are available.

Phew! If the user’s got this far, they are probably getting the hang of this unconventional UI. They need to click on their desired timeslot to proceed, then they need to fill in their address, payment details and finally they reach a confirmation page, shown below.

Here’s the confirmation page. The user will expect this to be emailed to them – that’s normal practice, right? Not on this site. If they don’t save or print this page, they are going to have real trouble getting into the museum. This key instruction is written half-way down the page, but once again the designers have made the same mistake of providing a weak, easily missable call-to-action.

To sum up, I’m hoping that this example has given you a reminder about the crucial importance of strong calls-to-action. It’s obvious stuff really, but we all make schoolboy errors from time to time.

Everyone I talk to is starting to get excited about MAX. Maybe it’s the Mark Hamill appearance, maybe it’s that some of the new features of the Flash Platform are starting to leak out, or maybe everyone is just excited to see a bunch of friends and hang out to talk tech. The keynotes this year should get Flash developers really excited about the platform. We’ve got some great stuff to show off and a couple of surprises that people will be talking about.

If you can’t make it, you’ll be missing out on the networking and the chance to bother talk to the engineering teams but we still want to give you as much access to the conference as possible. So this year we’ll be streaming the keynotes live AND if you show up 10 minutes early you’ll get some behind the scenes peeks that even the regular attendees won’t get to see. There’s going to be some special content just for those of you watching online and we’re going to make it fun and entertaining so you not only get to see the news live but also get some insight into what’s happening at MAX.

In addition, the team is making the most popular sessions in our three tracks – Design, Develop, and Envision – available each day and the other sessions will be following shortly thereafter. So you not only get the info live from the keynote but you can see the best sessions at MAX from wherever you are.

We just posted a new example of using SpatialKey to visualize crime in San Francisco. We load in 90 days of crime data from the city, then filter down to only include sales of heroin, crack cocaine, and methamphetamine within 1,000 feet of a school. Why those particular crimes around schools? The SFPD just launched a new initiative called “Operation Safe Schools” that specifically targets these drug crimes. If you’re caught dealing crack, heroin, or meth around a school while the school is in session you can get extra prison time.

Check out the video below and read the full article on the SpatialKey blog.

Read the whole article on the SpatialKey blog to see how we put this together and learn more about the SFPD’s “Operation Safe Schools.” You can also watch the full resolution video on YouTube

Stone – video

Fire – video

from SWISSMISS

Flickr user garmonique has a gorgeous set of fog photos up. My only regret is that I can't buy prints.

“The color of art is #A79F94″ by Joshua T. Nimoy. He calculated the average color from more than 26,000 images in the MoMa art collection.