Van Damme, that’s good design
Web designer Tim Van Damme, founder of Made by Elephant and blogger at Max Voltar, has skyrocketed from relative oblivion to comparative fame in little over a year. Before you succumb to jealousy, consider the man’s work. Consider, for example, his spanking new redesign of Gowalla, Austin-headquartered AlamoFire’s nifty, location-based social networking game for iPhone, Android, and even newer Blackberry devices (kind of).
Launched as a public beta in March 2009, Gowalla “uses a large catalog of virtual goods to encourage its users to go places and meet people.”
Seven years ago I was a cigarette smoker. Today I’m a compulsive Gowalla user. I check in at the corner deli, at the library, and at the movies. I check in when I get to my studio in the morning and first thing when I get home at night. (Well, maybe eighth thing when I get home—I have an active five-year-old and a sick dog to take care of first.)
I love Gowalla and now I love its website just as much as I love the application, thanks to the stylish skinning of young Master Van Damme.
Note that I haven’t mentioned content strategy, labels, user flow, error handling, and all the other things that go into most good redesigns. I haven’t mentioned those things because this redesign is mainly a skin job. Alamofire designed a great brand and crafted a fine piece of user experience (not to mention a host of kick-ass icons) well before involving Tim Van Damme. So the challenge here was to take a strongly branded, well-thought-out, existing site with a fanatical user base and an already super-strong visual identity, and to make it that much better.
He met the challenge, and then some. I wish I possessed before and after screen shots to show how and why the redesign trumps its predecessor without scrapping what users like me loved about the old look and feel. Aside from the one big change (a light green background that feels like a translucent overlay over the previous background), it’s all about the details here, and the details are primarily tiny enhancements to the user experience—from subtle glows that make the interface feel more responsive (more alive), to WordPress- and Mail-style numeric indicators that cue users when there’s new content behind a tab.
This is good design, the test of which, for me, is always that I wish I’d done it.
Filed under: Acclaim, Design, Web Design
33 Responses to “Van Damme, that’s good design”
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Gowalla is pretty neat, and I like Tim’s redesign. As usual, I’m jealous, and It’s nice for a newbie to have something to look up to.
Here are some before screenshots I took for a presentation I gave: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bramus/tags/gowalla/
Regards,
B!
True! Tim has skyrocketed to become one of my favourite designers gradually. A gem of a designer if I was to comment. The redesign is brilliant. They took something that was not bad and made it compelling.
Hats off to Maxvoltar superhero sans disguise. :)
Congratulations Tim & the Gowalla team. Cheers!
You’ve been showcasing a lot of great design(ers) on your blog lately. Most web design galleries have gone to hell in a handbasket in the last 6 years, highlighting even the most generic WordPress themes. Perhaps you could start one that doesn’t suck so we could all find new awesome things and designers to look at?
@Beth: http://www.drawar.com/gallery/
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great design and all, but the nitpicker in me has to mention the visible mosquito noise in those pictures at the top. Why choose JPEG for cartoon images? That’s exactly what PNG was designed to compress!
Bravo Tim! And I agree 100% with you Jeff, this design is more soothing and I just might use the website a little more now.
Although I have to admit, I am insanely jealous I didn’t come up with putting ASCII art in HTML comments. Nice [hidden] touch!
Visually it’s OK. But I’m completely new to Gowalla and I immediately looked for an about page and couldn’t find one and then I thought the three pics right in the center of the site were links, which they aren’t. Then I thought by clicking the sign up button would give me some indication of what the service is and it doesn’t. Maybe I’m just in the wrong business and should just stick with my painting because I just don’t get it. 90% of what is considered good design in my opinion just isn’t.
Tim is definately an icon of the best of the web nowadays. As for Gowalla’s new page, as Jeffrey said, this was not an easy task (contrary to what one might think at first) since he had to refresh an interface already implemented and being used by many people.
I think that he did a great job that anyone can criticize for better or for worst. Still it is undeniably a great refreshment for the guys at Gowalla and that suits them really well.
[...] Gowalla got a new and nice redesign by Belgian designerTim Van Damme. (Via Jeffrey Zeldman) [...]
@Justin:
You raise valid points. I confess that I have not seen the redesigned non-logged-in user home page (which is the page you saw and criticized). If this had been a formal site review, I would have logged out of my account and logged in to evaluate the home page non-Gowalla users see. I’m slightly embarrassed that I didn’t do that, but, again, I wasn’t conducting a formal review.
My memory of the home page non-users see is that it isn’t terribly explicit about what Gowalla is or why you’d want to Gowalla. And the site does not have an About page. From a Web 1.0 product offering point of view, you’ve identified the site’s major usability problems, which stem from a lack of content strategy.
Put another way, the folks who make Gowalla make it as if for themselves. They make something that is fun for them, don’t bother explaining it much, send it out to the world at large, and see what users have to say about it.
This isn’t how McDonald’s operates, but it is a fairly typical “Web 2.0″ strategy (Twitter does the same thing). Web 2.0 companies tend to create services quickly, toss them out without explanation, learn from their beta testers, and basically keep learning from their users. (Such products are in perpetual beta, essentially.)
For some consumers, this approach might not work, but it is fun for web geeks, and that’s the audience to whom Gowalla currently appeals.
I should add that not providing much explanation is also typical in the gaming industry (you don’t read a manual before using a game; you discover the game’s features by playing it. Again, this gaming sensibility, this reliance on user discovery, underlies a lot of Web 2.0 thinking, of which Gowalla is a product.
The other day someone said, “I hate when people cheat at Gowalla.”
And I said, “How can you cheat at a game that has no instructions?”
It’s not clear why you’d put something in the vault, or why you can’t take a vaulted item out of the vault again. Whether you actually have to go into, say, the Empire State Building to check into it, or whether simply standing in front of the building is good enough, is not explained anywhere, because there are no rules, no guidelines, no how-tos. (At least there are no official ones.)
I’m not trying to excuse usability problems or lack of content strategy; I’m just explaining why they might not be a priority for the makers of Gowalla, since the product is selling virally regardless.
:)
I didn’t read your comment Jeff, i skipped directly to the smiley. I hope you don’t mind. Hey How about a ‘skip to smiley’ link instead of a ‘skip to content’ link. I think i just got busted being anonymous and stuff. But… Hey!
First, thanks for the kind words all around Jeffrey. Appreciate the mention.
Second, to address the discussion above between Justin and Jeffrey: Valid points all around. I mentioned the other day to someone that this is very much a first pass at our complete redesign. There’s still a lot of work to do.
We’re releasing new versions of our mobile applications that are trending towards a lighter design and we did this quick and dirty pass on the website in order to get everything to somewhat match.
It’s not perfect. In fact, there are lots of things we’re not happy about. The video on the homepage is a giant fail, Youtube chrome and all.
That said, Jeffrey is right in that a lot of what we’re doing now is simply throwing jello on the wall to see what sticks. Would we like to have better help documentation or an FAQ? Absolutely. Would we need to write it again in 2 months if we did. Most definitely. And admittedly, we like that Gowalla has very few written “rules.”
So much is in flux right now that we’re having to make difficult decisions about where we spend our time. Eventually we’ll need to bring down some focus on our messaging and product, but that is likely still months away. For now, we’re just flying fast and loose as best as we know how.
We’ve definitely taken on some “design debt” in places, but we’ll be sure to pay it back someday with interest.
And Josh, just to be clear, the lack of rules isn’t a negative for me or a lot of users. Discoverability of new features and ways of
gaming themstrategizing is a lot of the fun! I hope Gowalla never gets too buttoned-up or too official.@Jeffrey: Thanks for your response. I appreciate it.
@Josh: Fair enough. Good luck with your redesign.
Cheers. :-)
I visited Gowalla.com. Really an awesome site. The design is mind blowing. Also its simple. Thanks for your share.
Jeffrey, I suspect the person talking about “cheating at Gowalla” was talking about you! I’ve seen you “check in” to hundreds of places you never stepped foot in but merely passed by. :-)
Regarding not telling people what a Web 2.0 product is, Josh’s answer is very revealing. Twitter was the same when it came out — I was, like Justin, a little miffed that I’d have to actually use the damn thing to learn what it was. As things turned out (and as Josh predicts will happen with Gowalla), “what Twitter is” evolved significantly over the first year. By inviting an adventurous community of users who don’t care about usefulness or practicality to just play with Twitter, they let the service’s usefulness more freely and naturally evolve.
This is risk-taking. This is what 37 signals means in their new book “Rework” when they say “planning is guessing”. There’s nothing wrong with guessing, or even flailing, as long as you admit that’s what you’re doing. Experimentation is guessing, too. Go science!
It’s hard for a small startup to send mixed messages to users: :”you should be using this” and “we don’t know what it is”. Cheers to Gowalla, and Twitter, for striking that balance.
No disrespect because it’s interesting concept, viral, excellent design, and well-executed. However…
Among many other things in this period of time, this is one of those things that I think people will look back on and say, “I can’t believe how much time I wasted checking in to places on Gowalla.” What I know, thanks to Gowalla, is that I think one of my buddies spends far too much money dining out. :)
[cue Cat's in the Cradle]
Kid: “Dad, why are you always checking your phone whenever we go somewhere? Can’t you just talk/play/spend time with me?”
Well I have to say that I am thoroughly impressed with the redesign.
Sir, you haven’t seen me do anything of the kind, unless you’ve found a way to walk beside me invisibly. If you’ve set Gowalla to notify your phone every time I check into a place, then you may well have been notified in several times in a row as I check into one place after another in quick succession. For instance, I’ll check into the Sex Museum on my way to Happy Cog. If I were you, I wouldn’t want Gowall to notify my phone every time a friend checked in somewhere. Such notifications can be quite annoying. Hence your exaggerated impression that I was checking into “hundreds” of places.
And, yes, exactly, a companion who saw me do this said I was cheating at Gowalla. I asked where it said in the Gowalla rulebook that you have to actually spend significant time inside a place before you’re allowed to check in. There is no such rulebook. We’re all making up how Gowalla works, and the makers of Gowalla are watching us do it … just as the makers of Twitter do.
Well, all planning is guessing, but you often still have to plan. I love 37signals, and “Rework” is a particularly liberating book. On the other hand, if you’re sending a rocket to Mars, you need to have a lot of meetings and do a lot of planning. If Jason Fried worked for Nasa, I don’t think he’d be telling us all that meetings are bullshit and planning is bullshit. (At least I hope he wouldn’t, or there would be a lot of dead astronauts.)
Different management styles work for different companies and different projects.
A couple dozen colleagues and I just spent a long day planning content strategy for a major museum. We’ll have many more planning meetings before we’re through. If we followed all of 37signals’s advice, and threw some copy on the museum’s website to see what happened, we’d be misrepresenting the museum, failing its mission, offending thousands of readers (not to mention a couple dozen curators who would quickly fire our asses).
I love 37signals but their saying “meetings are bullshit” and “planning is guessing” is like the Ramones saying “studying music is bullshit.” Maybe for the Ramones it is bullshit, but I wouldn’t staff the Cleveland Orchestra with untrained violinists.
Different strokes.
Tim’s fame skyrocketed after he made his personal website, which inspired lots of people and was discussed extensively.
Lately you seem to showcase several designers Jeffrey, I find it really positive and giving to the community. It adds to the whole Internet openness thing (“everyone has a chance”) and reassures (me personally at least) that it’s not about a clique of 10 persons being mentioned over and over again.
What if Happy Cog organized some kind of junior designer competition? That could seriously motivate people.
thanks
Thanks, George.
I like the way you think, sir!
I’m in agreement with George. I love that you’ve been sharing the work of other designers, and It’s really been valuable to be able to read your thoughts on why they’re good, especially from the perspective of someone just getting into the design/development field right out of school.
The pages at gowalla.com have lots of this weirdness:
<script type=”text/html” >
The content of those script elements are indeed HTML.
???
The pages don’t validate. Lots of errors. But who cares about such stuff nowadays?
Someone meaning me, to clarify.
I care about that stuff. Many of us do.
Are you suggesting that if a site has validation errors, it’s inappropriate to praise its design?
Nice site, more or less. But one site does not a great designer make.
Please don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just making a statement. One that is in fact fairly obvious.
Although he has only been working in the field a few years, Tim has already designed a number of noteworthy, talked-about sites, through his one-person shop, Made by Elephant.
Made by Elephant itself was a showcase of fascinating design ideas and implementations, all of them standards-based. Alas, since Tim has stopped accepting new projects, Made by Elephant is now merely a shell, and there’s no way that I can find to access Tim’s portfolio.
Nice design, Indeed! Tim is an inspiration for all of us about creating original and creative websites which at the same time are usable.
However I’ve found few issues at Gowalla Sign-up page. I hope you agree with these.
I think there is no verity of design here ,you may think in different way and make verity of designs.