XenoAbe Design

I’m putting together some designs for a Chrome Extension that would basically serve as a home page every time you open a new tab. I’ve seen some out there, but frankly they are terrible. I want one that is beautiful and provides lots of functionality that a user would want instantly at their fingertips. This would be fairly customizable and tailored to each user.

Some features I’m already considering:

• Bookmarks
• Twitter
• Facebook
• RSS Feed
• Notes
• Gmail Notifier
• Sports Scores

What are the features you would like to see in a home page?

As you can see, this is a series we’ll start here on XenoAbe Design. We’ll take a look at specific types of websites and a few usability issues as they relate to those websites.

News sites are some of the most visited websites on the internet today. They are where people go to find out about what’s going on in the world around them. Therefore, news sites store incredible amounts of information. This information needs to be well organized so that visitors can quickly access the particular bit of news they may be looking for. Actually, news sites need to follow similar rules to other sites, but there are some particular aspects of UX that are extraordinarily poignant for news sites. Let’s take a look at these and figure out what we can learn from them.

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Remember those Lincoln Logs you had when you were a kid? They came in all different sizes and sometimes they gave you a splinter, but most of the time they gave you a nice little log home for your G.I. Joes or Ninja Turtles. Now, it probably took you 15-20 minutes to get the log home just the way you wanted. How bad would it have been if you had to actually carve out blocks of wood yourself to create that little log home? It would have taken a long time and, frankly, would have caused a lot of frustration.

So, why would a designer always create everything from scratch? It’s only going to take more time and cause more frustration. Frustration is when we start to not think straight, make mistakes, and leave out details. We should stick to our equivalent of Lincoln Logs.

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I’ve seen so many awful restaurant sites when trying to find a place to go eat. Even scouring through the many sites of restaurants featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives I had a hard time finding just a handful of well-designed sites. I’m not sure who is putting these sites together but they fall victim to several follies and mistakes. So I figured that we need to take a look at what is important about a restaurant site that’s a little bit different from other sites.
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