I visited the Bike Friday Website today and was shocked. They changed their site. It was a good idea to change their site, since the old one was nearly a mess and difficult to navigate. But it was a bad idea to change it to what it is now. it is really a mess now.

Starting with the color and the background graphics, it looks pretty silly to have a silhouetted imagery. Everyone knows their bikes. If some one does not know, the graphics does nothing to educate them on their products. FAIL.

There are 3 Menu systems on the front page. Count 3. I think it is totally unnecessary. I prefer their original One menu system. Colors are selection is outrageous. white fonts on light green? Who chose that? FAIL.

Menus respond to Mouse over. in an eagerness to embrace Web 2.0, there is way too much javascript enabled automation. I don’t care for fancy graphics, I need the ability to know where to find things. Menus overlap, I am lost. FAIL.

Some sections in the front page are collapsed – By Default. Why put it up if you want to save space I ask? Some sections cannot be collapsed. Why? Inconsistency is the cornerstone of bad user Interface. Please take a leaf from Apple. FAIL.

Menu Hides under Images. FAIL.

I thought I was out of the era of Flickering Graphics. What do I get on the Front page? A rotating set of customer images. I preferred the previous version showcasing one image in the front page. It is easy to randomly show images whenever the page refreshes like RBW. This flashing images is making me disoriented. FAIL.

The cloud on Top right is silly. Please remove it. If you want to highlight some dealers, put it in a more structured location. FAIL.

I understand what BF was trying to do. I suspect maintaining their website was very manual and laborious and decided to jump to a database driven platform to ease their process. But what they have ended up with is a mish-mash of badly implemented ideas with no sense of design.

BF is an engineering company and I do not expect their website design to be aesthetically pleasing. At the least they should strive for usability. The old site was a bitch to navigate but I suddenly miss it now.

Please do something.

There was a recent TED lecture I watched where Don Norman described his ideas on Design. Some products are designed for utility, others for aesthetic appeal. Be it something you want to show off or something that brings a smile on your face, the design to appeal to ones emotion is kind of an important component of design as an art form.

Sometimes, designers may get so caught up with the idea of aesthetic design that they may overlook utility. Apple as a company is extremely well respected for their industrial design and striking the amazing balance between emotive design and an utilitarian product. And once in a while some products come along that is designed so well that people will ignore the lack of features and be willing to pay more money too, Think of the iPod.

A couple of days back, apple released a cool new iPod. The new iPod shuffle.

Notice that Apple is breaking its very successful click wheel / circular button layout with this iPod. You might also notice that there are no buttons on the surface, except for the tiny notch that is visible on top (You might want to visit apple to check out how it works).

Breaking a well established user interface is a great gamble to take. I am supposing that the design engineers, once they convinced the marketing and managing bosses, had a field day designing the product.

When I saw this shuffle, the first thing is stuck me was this:

Am I the only one to see the resemblance? Even the dimensions of the product match up approximately. The dimensions of the monolith is supposed to be 1:4:9 (squares of 1,2,3) and I see that the iPod shuffle (ignoring the clip) is about 5mm X 18mm X 45mm (almost a 1:4:9). I surely don’t see this as a coincidence, but a deliberate design choice. I can imagine the marketing insisting the need for a clip and the designers having a fight over removing it and finally a user group voting for having the clip, sigh.

To keep the design monolithic, apple seems to have decided to keep the surface totally blank except for the apple logo (pity about that too), but they put it on the clip

Not reading too deep on the corporate message that apple is passing, but I think it is not very subtle and we can expect brave new directions / products from them:

It is really cool to see a company not sitting on their successful products and designs (when was the last time creative changed its software interface) and bravely walk into unknown territory. Apple has the financial might to not worry about the failure of the shuffle but I don’t think that’s what drives them to innovate. If you look at the history of the company under Jobs (sometimes others too), they were highly innovative and not worried much about the implications to the company. As consumers, we benefit from their successes and failures and should be thankful that someone is looking out to push the boundaries of design innovation.