

Hey, HN. I put a lot of time and thought into this GUI. I'd love some feeback. - wmeredith
http://voltagecreative.com/design-aviary/home/

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adammarkey
The color contrast on the non-bolded blue text seems off and tends to hurt my
eyes in FF3.

Otherwise it's pretty easy to figure out what the site is supposed to do.

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gabrielroth
The three sentences in the box at the top are there to explain what the site's
all about, right? They're important. They're also too long, and much of the
text is pure padding.

Sentence one: "Select a topic below to listen in as the most vocal community
of first-adopters in the world talks design."

 _What is this 'most vocal community of first-adopters in the world'? I'm
confused!_

Sentence (or rather non-sentence) two: "Often a provider of insight on
tomorrow's headlines—occasionally of no use at all—always good* with morning
coffee…"

 _What's the missing referent here?_ What _is a provider of insight? Now I'm_
really _confused, plus my sense is that this is just self-promotion rather
than useful information, so I'm annoyed as well._

Sentence three: "Design Aviary displays the latest 99 Twitter entries relating
to a variety of design topics; is updated every 10 minutes."

 _Oh, I get it! Why did I have to read all that other stuff before you told
me_ what the heck is going on here?

Axe the first two sentences, and fix the grammar in the last one.

~~~
wmeredith
Done. I really like those other two lines though, but they obviously need some
work. I killed them for now.

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mildweed
I'm rather fond of the low-light version. I wish more sites had such a
feature.

~~~
wmeredith
Thanks. I thought it was an important feature to offer designers who might
spend a lot of time in front of computers at all hours of the day. This hit me
at about 11pm one night while I was working on the site and the white was
killing me.

On the other hand, the "bright mode" is great in my office which has three
massive windows. (I don't have some awesome corner office. I work in a loft
space with 4 other designer/developers and one end of the room has three
floor-to-14-foot-ceiling windows.)

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acro
On Chrome the font on the category tabs is nearly not readable, Firefox
displays the same font ok.

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quoderat
I like the initial presentation -- it's very clean and focused. But when you
click on the tabs/areas at the bottom, I have no idea what all that data is.

Perhaps it's just not aimed at me (that's probably a large part of it), but I
had no idea what was going on there. Is there a way to contextualize it
somehow or format it?

Ignore if I am just not getting it. But I do like the "Return to Top" button
at the bottom.

~~~
wmeredith
Users "not getting it" seems like a bad thing to ignore. Did the welcome note
not explain the site well? Or did you skim past it and go for the tabs?

~~~
quoderat
I skimmed it and went for the tabs. A bad habit of mine, but a lot of users do
this, too, I'd guess. It's a good idea, though, I think.

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nopal
I'd like it if switching between the tabs was handled via Ajax, rather than a
full request. The good part is that you've done things right and built it
without Ajax to begin with, so you can just Hijax
(<http://domscripting.com/blog/display/41>) the links.

Edit: The "Return to top" link could also be a link to an anchor, rather than
a link to the current page's URL.

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oconnor0
The tabs (Inspiration, Gigs & Works, etc.) stair step down in IE7.

Edit: The second time I visit I'm getting a blank page too.

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evanmoran
I would show less tweets as no one can read 99 of them. If you must, have a
more button like HN has.

The most important thing is putting the best tweets at the top -- basically it
is a search/aggregation website, so your choice of what to show is what will
differentiate you.

Love the low-light switching feature.

~~~
catch404
Automatically loading more when you reach the bottom could be a nice touch, as
Slashdot does.

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sprsquish
I could play with the low light switch all day. Love the transition effect.

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thalur
I just get a blank white screen on IE6 (at work). I don't know if that's
considered a good thing or a bad thing!

(And believe me, if they would let me use something other than IE6, I would.)

~~~
wmeredith
Haha. That's a bad thing. Considering the site's target audience is web
designers and graphic designers I really didn't even debug for IE 6. I did
however at least look at the site in IE 6 and it was terrible, but something
was still there. Hmmm... I'll have to look into that.

~~~
jokermatt999
It's working for me on IE6. The tabs switch back and forth rapidly on
mouseover in the wrong location, but otherwise it appears ok, I think.

Edit: Wait, are the tabs supposed to descend from the box, rather than sit
flush against it? If not, that's also off in IE6...but it _is_ IE6.

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snorkel
I think it looks good. I'd keep the OPTIONS panel open since it's not taking
up a lot of space and make it's a little more obvious what the purpose of the
page is.

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ruddzw
The character separating the date and username (♒ if it shows up here) looks a
lot like equals to me, and confused me for a while. Just a small weirdness.

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whughes
It's nice, but the site requires horizontal scroll on my small browser window
on my MacBook screen. That's my biggest complaint, really.

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vivekamn
When you have tabs(options/welcome in your case), it might be a good idea to
visually indicate which is the current tab.

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access_denied
The back-to-top button is the first of its kind I actually used without fear
that it would not work somehow.

