sarahcpr

The Good: CNN.com
I absolutely love the CNN.com redesign. It’s aesthetically and functionally beautiful, and it’s not hard to articulate why. I think the first key to its sublimeness comes from a hot new trend in web design: white modules on a light gray background. The super subtle contrast gives the page definition without overpowering the content, which is key for a news site. The other reason for its success, I think, is a very minimal color pallatte that’s largely black, white, and gray, with splashes of bright red to create interest. There’s blue links, of course, but they’ve done away with the underlines. I’m a big fan of this as well. The CNN header is full-width, but the main content of the page remains within a constrained space, so that you get a sense of immersiveness and great branding without compromising the ability to take in lots of text. The video interface is absolutely great - huge video, a well-organized gallery of clips, and the ability to browse and save clips to a running playlist as you watch another one - awesome!

And last but certainly not least: buttons that turn into tabs. Although they’re a little quirky, I think CNN might be onto something here - people understand tabs, but don’t click on them, people understand and click on buttons. They’ve combined the best of both worlds. Kudos to the CNN design team - I’m sure there’s way more going on here than I’ve even noticed.

The Bad: Tailgate Transactional Banners

I’m sure the idea of transforming banner ads into points of purchase is every businessman’s wet dream, but I think this is a bad idea from pretty much every angle. Even when I am in purchasing mode and I happen to see an ad for the precise thing that I’m ready to buy (which has to be hardly ever the case), am I going to want to enter my credit card information into what claims to be a secure banner ad on an unsecure site? People already don’t really trust advertising, and banner ads are complained about more often than not. So the point is, even after getting over the hurdle of showing this to the right customer at just the right time, even then the customer will probably want to go to a secure site in order to make the purchase. And, also, expanding banners are really annoying. (My name is Sarah and I used to design annoying banner ads.)

The Ugly: Bank of America

What Bank of America has done with their account view is not bad, it is just ugly. They’ve added a lot of great functionality, including the ability to rename your transactions, make notes on them and organize them. But the icons. Oh God, the icons. They’re hideous. They’re huge, they’re clunky, they get in the way, and to be honest, they don’t give me any extra information; I have to rollover them to see what they mean, and even then it’s only adding cognitive load, not streamlining my experience.

I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in banking websites. I was excited to hear about Webase [via] which will allow developers to access and manipulate financial data in interesting ways - like (hopefully) displaying your transactions on a map and being able to drag a timeline around and see both when and where your transactions took place! I also think that bank statements are a great place to provide reviews. The moment I think to write a review of a restaurant or hotel or other place I’ve been, is usually while I’m there, or just after I leave. But that almost never coincides with me actually going home, getting on a computer and writing a review. As I look through my bank statement, though, it tells a nice long story about all of the restaurants, bars and other establishments I’ve been at over the past couple months. And I start to remember what my experience at each of those places was - so it would be great to be able to share my opinion on each of those places right there, for either public or private consumption.

Some really cool experimental banking interfaces were presented at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, in the Corporate Makeover Session. I don’t remember who exactly did what, but I did manage to take some photos of what was presented. The demos were beautiful and inspiring…I have high hopes for banking interfaces in the future.