I’m seeking examples of websites that are especially good in the areas of simplicity, coherence, and generally connecting users with the information they seek in ways that are unusually efficient and effective. The emphasis should be on sites that do ordinary things unusually well, rather than sites whose content itself is extraordinary.
In your opinion, what websites are notably well designed?
I’ve been doing Web design, information architecture, and usability since the early 90’s … my first question would be; what kind of site? Shopping? Marketing? Informational? Personal? Collaboration? etc…
There are good examples of each type. But first and foremost, the content and user needs should always drive the design; not the other way around, and this is where most sites first failure is.
For a very general example, CNN’s Web site does an extremely good job of acheiving it’s site goals and meeting its customer needs. It’s simple, clean, and easy to navigate. (it helps that they’ve poured hundreds of thousands into usability testing to ensure they’re meeting their reader’s needs).
I’d say Google meets all of your criteria, with mathematical elegance.
Youtube couldn’t be much easier.
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/ has a weekly listing of best designs. If you’ve been in web dev very long, you’ll recognize the names on their Advisory Board.
Barry, where are you seeing this list of best designs? I searched the whole site and didn’t see anything.
I subscribe to one of their blogs. It’s a weekly item. I was sure I’d seen it somewhere on the site before though.
Last week’s and this week’s best new designs
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/news/view.php?ID=682
Informational.
So you’re wanting examples to use as models for building another site?
The following sites are collections of good web site designs:
http://www.webcreme.com/
http://cssremix.com/
http://designsnips.com/
http://www.cssartillery.com/
http://onestargallery.com/
The first mission is to show examples of good design to someone who seems to have little notion that such things matter.
For the viewer, yes. For the content producers, not so much. It’s better than it was, but navigation is still a bit unintuitive - or at least I find it so - sometimes takes me quite a while to find the bit where I can upload content.
Reviewing you original criteria: simplicity, coherence, and generally connecting users with the information they seek
How about The Internet Movie Data Base? (www.imdb.com) It has a paragraph right there at the top telling you what the site is about and the search widget is dead center at the top so you can’t miss it. It’s very community driven.