Hunter Island Press Test & Polish
A few days ago I posted about the how and why of the Hunter Island Press Inc redesign. Needless to say the HIP site had just launched and so missed some features and still had unfound bugs as full testing had not completed. So there are some more things I could probably say about it now the dust is settling.
Design Changes
The stark red blocks on the side of pages had the effect of drawing the eye in the same way a brick draws the eye just before it takes out your eye on a corner kebab. I faded back the colour contrast to make it less overt. I used the red paint textured background image on that area because we wanted some artist quirky elements but I’m not that satisified with this quite yet. It may still change for the better. The horizontal navigation bar now has dropped the equally overt brick-like metaphor used on hover to become simply the red line and two shades lighter than black on hover. Much more subtle and simple. On a large screen you may also notice the background image is removed.
Usability and Accessibility
Some pages were deeper than one level so for usability breadcrumbs were introduced through the sub-pages in members galleries, group exhibitions, featured interviews and FAQs. This should provide some logical pathways at that level. I had considered using ambient signifiers on certain sections (for example, blue elements for pages within the galleries) but decided the site didn’t need that at this stage. I may still put more subtle cues in there but it needs testing before I’d add anything. Also, a Hunter Island Press favicon has been added to the site as a usability enhancement. This is a simple gesture which can be very useful when searching bookmarked pages.
Lightboxes and Galleries
The group exhibitions section now has a number of lightboxes - although the button controls still need to be changed. Thumbnails in these galleries link to the lightboxed larger images which I admit are large files but the nature of the artistic content does justify in some part the bandwidth of large content. Feedback regarding this expectation as a gallery was a big part of choosing to go down this road. I am aware there are some issues within that decision but I stand by the choice in this instance.
Testing and Platform Limitations
The site has been tested on Windows XP Home using Firefox 2.0.0.12, Opera 9.24, Safari 3.0.4 and IE6. It has also been tested on Vista in IE7. Screen width dimensions used for consistency, readability and usability were 1024, 800, 300.
Issues located and fixed included an overflow: auto on the #alley2 div which caused IE7 to go ballistic on the home page, several inconsistencies in Opera and Firefox which needed to be resolved and a slight tinkering with min-widths to get it to play nice at 300 pixels screen width. Internet Explorer 6 is now fed a fixed width of 920 pixels. During this process I fixed the 800 width issue on the horizontal navigation bar as well as the issue with floats which caused a less than optimal degradation. At 300 pixels some content in the footer became hidden. All these issues were resolved.
Still to Achieve this Week
The next important thing to provide Hunter Island Press is the User Style Guide so some consistency can be achieved between authors. It should also be made available to members as instructional so they may become new site authors. This will be provided within the next few days. Otherwise there are only a few small things to achieve on the site. I would like to have major pages show which page is currently the one users are viewing, for example. But they are only small things.
Those are the changes and improvements. If you find any bugs or browser crashing then please contact me and I’ll try to resolve the issues as soon as possible.
Update: 21 February, 2008
The top navigation bar now also stays highlighted when those top level pages are being viewed. If someone is viewing the News, archives or search or single posts the news remains active on the navbar. While they aren’t loud signposts they may provide some ambient indication to the user of their current location on the site. As it grows this will become more of an issue.
