This isn’t really hot news, but it was news to me when George Oates mentioned it in passing during her piece at Dconstruct 07.

In an age of curious-sounding Web-site names, “Flickr” came largely by accident. The domain owner of “flicker.com” wouldn't sell, so Caterina suggested “Flickr,” which Butterfield says made the service stand out. “We always had to spell it out for people, which helped make it stick,” he notes. [read more]

Unsurprisingly, correctly spelled domains get loads of hits from people who don’t know how to spell web 2.0 brand names, and assume that the correct spelling would be the right way to do it. So if you mis-spell your brand name just for a bit of ‘web 2.0 distinctiveness’, are you really doing yourself any favours? After all, just two weeks ago, Del.icio.us decided to make the switch to delicious.com. How very sensible.

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An article in the Guardian last weekend (01/09) gave a disappointingly narrow view of 'good design', missing an opportunity to demonstrate design that supports modern social challenges. Instead the article focused on aesthetics, creativity and novelty - important, but not exclusively so.

The '50 best' selection included practitioners known for creative lateral thinking (e.g Thomas Hetherwick). Much of the featured work is clever and creative and aesthetically ground-breaking. Other work is novel or witty or classic or otherwise interesting.

These expressions of creativity perpetually take the limelight over designers or agencies or companies that use design to directly address contemporary challenges. It is worrying that this old fashioned view of design prevails.

Missing out is a design that looks to directly improve quality of life, rather than amuse or provoke intellectual exercise.

Into this category we could fit, perhaps, user-centred agencies looking to improve lives by encouraging industry to create better things. But could also include the likes of Hillary Cottam, who applies design to improve health and education services, Dot07 who bring together designers and thinkers to discuss contemporary issues or for celebrity cachet, Wayne Hemmingway who is, after fashion design and punditry, addressing the insanity of the product packaging industry. Doubtless there are others.

I'd have thought the time was right to consider carefully the design 'trends' aligned with contemporary challenges. I found the article supported a version of design that didn't need the attention and didn't tap into a contemporary reflective mood where manufacturing, consumerism, sustainability and ultimately, for me at least, design are in the dock.

Article: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/design/story/0,,2159165,00.html

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Penguin Books and Dorling Kindersley have just completed a user-centred re-design of their websites. We're pleased and proud that they chose Flow to work with them on the projects.

Penguin and DK's teams told us that they wanted to do some significant rethinking about the purpose of the sites, and the needs of target users. We started with contextual research to build a genuine understanding of what target users need from publishers' websites, and to examine the user experience offered by the current Penguin and DK sites.

From there, Flow conducted workshops to help the teams work out a new user experience strategy, build personas and scenarios and create new site concepts. We consulted to the in-house design teams during the detailed wire framing process, conducted the usability testing, and provided information architecture support for the new facetted classification engine.

Anna Rafferty, Penguin's digital marketing director, has written a blog post about the process.

"Months of workshops, designing, testing and re-designing later and we're happy that we've shifted our site from being a company on broadcast to being genuinely reader-centric."

And Jeannette Angell, Penguin and DK's online development manager has just been interviewed about it by e-consultancy.

"If there's anyone reading who hasn't yet sat behind mirrored glass, watching your visitors try and fail to do what seems to you to be the most obvious task, I urge you to experience it. The lessons learned from this experience can be staggering!"

Congratulations to everyone on the Penguin and DK teams on embracing the user-centred approach, and delivering the sites after so much hard work. And thanks for working with Flow!

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