Design by Fire: Design Eye for the Usability Guy
Fantastic step-by-step redesign of a useit.com column. Having never seen Queer eye for the straight guy some of the comedy value is lost, but as an academic exercise in the value of decent design, it works fabulously.
It’s a bit like an open house version of those cool redesigns 37 Signals has done.
It’s also gratifying to see a fundamentally more useful and usable example of the appliance of thought into design. The fact that it makes such a shit webpage layout much more usable, and takes a nice pop at Neilsen, is all the more better. Although to be fair Jakob Neilsen’s prosaic page presentation and fuck-you attitude is really all part of a attention grabbing strategy.
Also interesting – look at the mini flash ‘education’ piece they built out of the content (about 2/3rds down the page) – it really works. Usually a flash treatment would get in the way of two pages of content – but here it lets you focus on a ‘lesson’ at a time and it doesn’t feel a forced chunking exercise. The lovely, simple page forwarding and animation works brilliantly as well.
No idea where I found this link, probably Kottke