Bedford Hand Me Down

A place for the community to share belongings that can be passed along and put to use. The goal of the Beford_HMD is to help the local community learn how to share and foster a sense of belonging.

[justmigrate]

Hi,

I just moved my posts from Posterous! Do go though my blog for all the new posts.

Its easy to migrate try JustMigrate

3Crumbs app - Are you the local thrifter we all have been looking for? 

[andrewgiannelli]

[andrewgiannelli]

VIP Art Fair: Designing Without Standards

January 24, 2011

As a digital design director and art collector who now lives 50 miles outside of NYC the VIP Art Fair launch this Saturday morning was one of my most anticipated events of the New Year. 

Overall, the event did not live up to my expectations of a good online experience.  In general my expectations are quite high given that I design interactions and online experiences for a living (andrewgiannelli.com).  If however I view this experience as a beta launch then, I can say it was acceptable.  Unfortunately the fair wasn’t positioned as a beta launch and as a collector it cost $100 dollars to access the gallerists’ at the art fair. 

When designing any product there are standards and standards exist when designing experiences online. The designers of the VIP Art Fair chose to either ignore most of them for the sake of perhaps being different or just lacked experience designing interactions online.

Below is a sampling of some of the low hanging fruit user experience issues I noted when attending the VIP Art Fair.

Stress Test–– My inability to access the site due to heavy traffic is a Faux pas and as I write this two days after launch, here is a comment from VIP Art Fair Facebook’s page:

See the full gallery on Posterous

I do not believe any atomized art fair producer would ever say they created an event that couldn’t deliver the experience they had promised to both buyers and sellers.  So why should we hold an online art fair to different standards.

I believe The VIP Art Fair will attempt to turn this negative into a positive and claim that the overwhelming response to the event was unanticipated and proof of it’s success.

Site performance is always the 500 pound gorilla in the room but with the anticipated demand the VIP Art Fair garnered they could have projected at least 25 times more than their estimated traffic to the website and stress tested this volume before launch. 

Search for the Search–– This essential web feature is always very easy to find and at the very top of EVERY page. Regardless of what industry you are in most users expect a Google like experience when searching. This means a ubiquitous search box that provides simple, fast, smart, relevant and organized results that can be easily sorted.

Search on The VIP Art Fair is only available form the home page and one needs to “search for the search”—located at the bottom of the home screen view.  The search is presented in three categories: Galleries, Artists and Artworks—as if  these three characteristics do not share anything in common at this art fair. A good online search experience requires one search field.  Conducting a search on Neo Rauch would return a page that includes the artist bio, his artwork in the show and the David Zwirner Gallery which represents him. This is standard search behavior and most online users expect this type of experience. 

Navigation–– I should have taken the tutorial first to figure out how to navigate the VIP Art Fair.  But why should I have to learn how to navigate this site?  It really isn’t that different than any other experience online.

Why is the Home button hidden under the Atrium label  and what is Atrium anyway?  I can’t seem to click on it.  I guess that’s the main hall – which includes the subsections; home, artists and artworks – but why not include others in the atrium such as the Gallerists, sponsors and publications? It’s simply not very  intuitive and confusing.

Another convention of good site navigation is breadcrumbs.  For those of you who are not interaction designers, Jakob Neilsen explains it best

Breadcrumbs show people their current location relative to higher-level concepts, helping them understand where they are in relation to the rest of the site.

Breadcrumbs afford one-click access to higher site levels and thus rescue users who parachute into very specific but inappropriate destinations through search or deep links.

Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing: people might overlook this small design element, but they never misinterpret breadcrumb trails or have trouble operating them. 

For example I clicked on the Emerging label in Fair Maps section and then clicked on the Alex Zachary Gallery link. When in the gallery I could not simply click on the title “Emerging” at the top of the page to take me back to the full list of Emerging galleries—I had to bring my cursor to the top doormat ( navigation pane that slides down ) and click on the Emerging link under Atrium or use the back button.  I could have clicked next gallery or previous gallery links at the top of the page but I wanted to get back to the Emerging list of galleries and not move along linearly from gallery to gallery.

Scrolling Through the Galleries—Saturday was a bit chilly so I was glad I didn’t have to make the trek to Chelsea.  Overall this experience worked as well as other scrolling experiences online. 

I was able to view artwork from the David Zwirner Gallery and add them to a list for future consideration. I’m a Neo Rauch fan and would like to own one of his works in the future.

When scrolling through galleries however, it is a bit  difficult to quickly and easily see a connection between the artwork and the artist label at the bottom of the page. This issue was particularly apparent within the Limoncello Gallery where all the images are Polaroids and the artwork indiscernible.  This is mainly due to the artist name being too far removed from the artwork in view. When I arrived at the Limoncello Gallery I just assumed that the Polaroids were from the same artist and didn’t see the name at the bottom of the screen updating as I moved from image to image. 

[andrewgiannelli]

Design With Empathy

December 29, 2010

I’ve been designing for most of my career and much of it as the Design Director of The Wall Street Journal Online (1995 – 2008). I designed (with a dream team) WSJ.com, the first successful paid online news publication.  We were envisioning the future form of The Wall Street Journal and it was clear to us that future was online and we had to work hard to prove it to the board and other c-level executives.

One of my design tenets is “design is about paying close attention to one’s surroundings and empathizing with it.”  I followed this one tenet when designing for subscribers of The Wall Street Journal Online and in doing so I was able to exploit the strengths of the Internet to provide a valuable experience to WSJ.com’s readers and add revenue to my employer.

Recently, I have broadened my reach when thinking about design. I’ve been trying to connect to experiences which have negatively impacted someone’s life due to poor design decisions. This approach has expanded my vision and made me much more critical of all types of experiences both online and offline.  One in particular resonated deeply within me.

 In August of this past summer, Mr. Krishna Jayaraman died in a hit and run accident which occurred five miles from where I live in NY.  The New Canaan Patch reported that: 

“In a scene reminiscent of the movie "Crash," the lives of Kate Regan, 32, and Krishna Jayaraman, 82, and their families, collided when the car Regan said she was driving hit and killed Jayaraman as he was collecting the mail in front of his son's home on Oenoke Ridge. The accident happened on the afternoon of Aug. 18, close to the border between New Canaan and New York State. “

As a designer with empathy for both sides of this tragedy, I immediately saw fault with the experience of getting one’s mail in residential neighborhoods. Although the United States Postal Service standards calls for a residential mailbox to be set back 6 to 8 inches from the front face of the curb or road edge to the mailbox door, one actually needs to stand in the road to open the front of the mailbox.  Unfortunately, The USPS standards favor the US Postal drivers.  The 6-8 inch setback is to ensure that an average human arm will reach the mailbox door from the mail truck on a road.  It does not take into account the mail recipient, a human being, perhaps a bit too young or old standing in the road to get the mail.

I felt for Mr. Krishna Jayaraman, Kate Regan, their families, my wife and kids and everyone who stands in the road to get their mail. From my perspective, I felt that that this tragedy could have been avoided had Mr. Jayaraman been standing on the curbside and not the road.  Yes standing on the curbside getting one’s mail is very doable, had the mailbox been designed with a back door. This isn’t brilliant, hard to do or even novel, but it is very much needed in redesigning mailboxes if we care to save lives.

 See my photograph of the prototype I created from two classic metal rural mailboxes.  I’m calling this classic rural mailbox The Krishna and giving some of the proceeds of the first 24 hand built versions to the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.  It is an independent, publicly funded, 501 (c)(3) charitable research and educational organization established in 1947 by the American Automobile Association. The AAA Foundation's mission is to prevent traffic deaths and injuries by conducting research into their causes and by educating the public about strategies to prevent crashes and reduce the impact when they do occur.

I plan to complete the first 24 Krishna Mailboxes by March of 2011 and display them at Weed and Duryea for the New Canaan community to ponder how we can design better mailboxes to save lives.

[andrewgiannelli]

A Critical Observer with Mischievous Tendencies

November 17,  2010

Robert Attanasio has been quietly documenting the contemporary art market in New York City with the verve of a Weegee at a crime scene. His current show titled “Evidence” at the Jim Kempner Fine Art Gallery is an entirely new mix of his unique perspective. 

He is a political conceptualist with a sense of humor grounded in the absurd.  A review of Attanasio's last show in Art in America said, "...bringing to mind artists from Martha Rosler to Kurt Schwitters to younger scavengers of pop-culture slogans and imagery, like Nate Lowman, Attanasio employs a shrewder eye than most..."

While working inside the art world during the day, Mr. Attanasio takes Dérives (in the spirit of the Situationist International) during lunch, evenings and on the weekends, plastering New York City’s neighborhoods where galleries are located with stickers of his “sightings” of artists’, gallerists' and critics. The stickers are typically small text-based work that capture precisely and powerfully (as in a snapshot or a documentary video) our culture’s obsession with the art world and stardom.  For example; “Saw Barbara London nodding off at a video screening at the Lincoln Center Video Festival." " Saw Dan Graham exit McDonald’s”, “Saw Julian Schnabel look at me looking @ him.” “Saw Sean Kelly order 4 drinks at a bar and leave a two dollar tip on a $23 tab.” 

In addition to his “Sightings” there are a number of “Collected Fragments”  (1990 -2010) from the real artworks of: Francis Alys, Olaf Breuning, Martin Creed, Tom Friedman, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Nam June Paik, Ugo Rondinone, Robert Smithson, Fred Tomaselli and others.

The artwork fragments collected by Attanasio consist of paint chips, shards, hair, paint brushes, TV knobs, etc., which all amount to a symphonic blast of gold dust from the contemporary art scene.

A paint chip found on the floor of Fred Tomaselli’s studio and showcased in a black velvet jewelry box captures the essence of the aura that is created by those who toil day and night to establish value for the art cognoscenti.  Attanasio’s appropriation of these fragments show an almost mystical reverence of the art world and at the same time reveal how precious contemporary art has become.

Attanasio also included work by others artists and deems them "Artists of the Year.” These artists are off the radar of the blue chip gallerists’ and are too unpredictable for a cautious art market. Thorn, Taye, Price, Chabin, Bezzola and Benesch however, provide proof that there are more than the usual suspects making collectible art.

In the words of Ken Jacobs, an American experimental filmmaker and Distinguished Professor of Cinema at SUNY- Binghamton,“Robert Attanasio is one subtle, non-stuffy, "mind-expanding" “cine-troublemaker".”

[andrewgiannelli]

The Semantic Web Will Civilize Us

November 3, 2010

  The United States trails most European countries in the adoption of Electronic Health Records ( EHR's).

    The United States trails most European countries in the adoption of Electronic Health Records ( EHR's).

U.S. patients need to become fully aware of the immediate value EHR's will bring to their health standards. The semantic web is the catalyst that will help designers envision applications and great user experiences so desperately needed in the Health Care Industry.