We’ve all seen websites that functioned well, but were seriously lacking better design… remember myspace.com? We’ve also encountered websites and blogs filled with links to help get them ranked on search engines while sacrificing content integrity. Lastly, we’ve all found that beautiful flash site that we could look at for hours, but still have no idea how to find the information we went there to find. These are common place and most sites fall into one of these categories. Even our own monkeyfoot.com site fails in some of these areas.

In order to help you visualize the predicament, we’ve put together a venn diagram that shows the different skills and their overlap.

As you see in the diagram, there is a utopia that can be achieved through perfect harmony of the 4 skills. But similar to getting your order right in the drive through, this is rare. It requires people in each of these areas of expertise to trust the judgement of the others and respect their role in the process.

This diagram is not meant to indicate that it takes 4 people to build any site. Many experienced individuals contain multiple qualities from this diagram. Many developers understand SEO and development and a lot of designers understand both usability and design. But it’s extremely rare to come across an individual that can do all 4 successfully. A lot of people think they can, but the reality is that each area is changing drastically on a day to day basis that if they were to try to keep up, then they wouldn’t have time to work on your project.

So how can you achieve interactive project utopia? Hire people that respect and value people with other skillsets. Here at Monkeyfoot, our team members love input from different departments and strive for that utopia on each project. We understand the compromise required from each of us when working towards that goal. We don’t hire interactive divas that consider us lucky for the opportunity to work with them. We hire experienced craftsmen that understand their place in the process and strive for perfection on every project.

The GPS site was developed because of the overwhelming amount of content Summit had created for the service. If Monkeyfoot was to integrate that content into their www site, it would have seriously unbalanced the focus of their website and would have given the appearance that this was their primary service. The fact is that it is just a small portion of the myriad services that Summit provides for their clients from risk management to energy invoice auditing. By creating a separate website, it allowed us to focus the entire message on their sustainability service.

Summit also had a challenge of addressing potential clients at different levels of sustainability understanding. This meant that Monkeyfoot could not assume the viewer would understand the terminology used in a basic navigation architecture. However, Monkeyfoot also had to address the fact that some viewers would actually be very familiar with the terminology and would potentially take offense if the site was geared towards education.

Monkeyfoot chose to address this issue via multiple navigation types. There are 4 types of navigation used in the site – all using the same content expertly written by the client, Summit.

Basic navigation:

This is the straight forward horizontal navigation with drop down options. Most websites use this standard form of navigation.

Story-based navigation:

The story-based navigation is kicked-off via the GPS device in the top left of the home page. By selecting your understanding of sustainability on the scale, the user is placed at specific points within the website.

Question-based navigation:

This navigation attempts to take users to places within the site that answer specific questions. This can be seen on the bottom left of the home page.

Keyword-based navigation:

This navigation is based on users looking for specific keywords that may not be represented in the basic navigation. This type could take many forms, such as that of a sitemap or glossary. Monkeyfoot chose to be more creative and design a map to keep with the theme of the GPS and apply those keywords as locations on that map. This can be viewed via the tab at the top right of the home page.

So, how has the site done? Much of the performance information is confidential, but the client has passed along that the site has generated sales and their SEO ranks have increased for sustainability keywords – thus getting them in front of more potential clients. For example, as of the writing of this post, a google search for “sustainability services” returns this site as the #4 result on the first page.

The iPhone presented a lot of great usability challenges, but in the end, the interface did not lend itself to real world applications. Everything needs to be designed for big fingers on a little screen and can only be delivered in bite-size chunks of information. With the new iPad, that has changed. While we still need to deal with big fingers for navigation, there’s now a full keyboard that can be utilized for large volumes of input, as well as a much larger screen (1024×768).

The reality of a doctor or contractor using an iPhone for treatment or project management is a stretch. How would you feel if your doctor tried to show you your latest MRI scan on a small screen and point out the meniscal tear you suffered from too much break dancing at the holiday office party? Now, how would you feel if he did the same on a much larger screen? You’d still feel like you should cut back on drinking at work events, but you’d at least feel more confident about seeing the actual injury.

Star Trek is here. Well, not the “boldly going” part, but at least the cool hand held computer screens.

Many “experts” have scoffed and said that apps for the iPad will fail because users will just use web apps now. While the iPad does make web apps more accessible than the iPhone, we’re still limited by the rules of the Safari browser. We also need to consider that a mouse pointer is far more exact than a thumb or finger – 2×2 pixel area for a mouse, approximately 10×10 for a finger. For those 2 reasons alone, apps will succeed.

Unfortunately, the larger screen will allow more room for error in the interface and suddenly there will be a huge surge in designers calling themselves usability experts or interface designers. Simply laying out a navigation and putting a gradient under it does not quality these individuals for the title of usability expert.

So, yeah. You get it. Monkeyfoot likes the iPad.

But… there’s still some questions in our minds about the functionality. How will the iBookstore work? Will everyday developers and writers be able to sell books through the store like people do on iTunes? What does the SDK look like for those books? When developing apps, do we have to create iPad and iPhone versions together? If not, will they be showcased as such in the app store?

Monkeyfoot has already developed a few concepts for our clients to utilize the iPad for their business. Want us to do the same for you? Head over to the “contact” page and tell us what you’re looking for.

Usability and interface challenges in the mid 90s were fairly trivial compared to those of today. 256 available “web safe” colors, 640×480 resolutions were standard and websites didn’t consist of more than a handful of pages. In the late 90′s when Flash became mainstream, we were also dealing with larger variations in colors, resolutions and site depths.

Over the past 10 years or so, most of the variables became standardized. Colors are no longer an issue. Resolutions can be focused at 1024+ and the emergence of CSS has allowed us to address the variations gracefully. We’re still dealing with IE and the browser wars, but in general the development community has most of those issues sorted out.

The launch of the iPhone in 2007 gave usability experts a chance to flex their muscles once again. Memories of small resolutions in the 90′s flooded back to us, but this time we were faced with the challenge of a mouse pointer (the human finger) that was gigantic compared to the little arrow we’re used to. White space became vitally important, and we had to address how a user’s hand would be positioned to use the interface.

The Apple announcement this week will once again call usability experts into action. These challenges of an unknown resolution, framework, and interaction method are the equivalent of an old world explorer discovering new lands. The way we interact with the world around us is about to change. The internet will no longer be a place accessed from your home or office. Serious applications will be in the palm of our hands from now on. Usability experts, rejoice. The world is about to change and our services are required.

The minisite also doubles as an SEO effort to increase visibility of Summit’s sustainability service offerings. Summit Energy and Monkeyfoot teamed up to create a site that went against the standard SEO spam website tactics and created a fun, engaging story that put SEO second to great content. The site showcases items such as cost saving measures used in Santa’s workshop and carbon offsets for his reindeer delivery system.

In developing the 3 week project, Monkeyfoot was responsible for the initial concepts, 3D village rendering, design and the HTML/CSS. The client supplied the great creative copy based on the provided outline.

New posts are coming… potentially as early as today. We’re working on a series about why the usual agency model no longer works in a world of interactive services, as well as a few interactive tips and tricks from industry experts.