Blog Home » Archive for the ‘UI Design’ Category

Well, we thought we’d help out our lovely new neighbours (Underground Rebel Bingo Club) with a cheeky little revamp of their website. Keeping in theme of the ‘operating from our bedroom’ we put together a quick and dirty redesign for them.

If you like bingo, drawing all over yourself and having a damn good time then, my friends, Rebel Bingo will take over your life!

Caffeinehit’s latest client project is launched today (Tuesday 9th June 2009). The new website design and UI design for G3 Global.

Having sat in the duldrums for some time and been the victim of stinted additions to the site over a long period of time the G3 site design had been left disjointed, clumsy looking and overloaded with text. Working with the G3 team we stripped down the content and created a more unified site with slick UI and obvious service / product highlights.

The site now has a much simpler site structure and the introduction of photographic and visual elements gives the site a fresher and cleaner and feel.

We’re looking forward to hearing what sort of feedback comes through.

Take a look at the live site at http://g3it.com and some screengrabs here.

I purchased my Apple “boys-toys-make-me-look-cool” TV kind of way back in August and I hate to say this, but I haven’t actually watched any ‘normal’ TV since. Not only does this mean my index finger is slowly slipping off the pulse of popular culture but it’s also putting me at risk of having my flat reposessed (I know I rent but it’s more for effect!).

So why is this so revolutionary? Well, to be honest it’s not for most of you. It is for me, I missed out on TiVo and the like so here I am, rambling…

Apple TV is quite possibly one of the best (and worst) purchases I’ve made, this year at least. The pure volume of content that they’re starting to get on there is awesome. I know it costs less to buy the DVD’s and have them in ‘real life’ from Amazon or Play but the problem (for me at least) is that I want it NOW!

Saying that Apple TV is great and wonderful and everything is all well and good but there are definitely some improvements that could be made to help suck more cash out of our pockets.

Make the box more eco friendly.
It’s very difficult to switch the box off, on the first software release you used to be able to switch the box off in any menu or even watching movie/tv by simply holding down the menu button. So, rather than faff around and find the top menu I just leave it on, thus increasing my already large carbon footprint.

Suggest content with friends
Now I know this probably isn’t Apple’s cup of tea, having a social network within the Apple TV box BUT it would be great if you could suggest a movie / tv programme to a friend. Having suggested stuff to friends in the past it would be a nice little touch if you could do it from the TV itself.

Apple TV Suggestions
By making more of tracking the content that I am rating (and how I rate it), the content within my favourites and what I’ve purchased it should be able to start to see what sort of stuff I might like. At the moment there’s no use of the suggestion system that they’ve just started to use on iTunes. It could be so much more powerful if you have more than the “people who purchased this also purchased…”, that only goes so far and really doesn’t make the most of what Apple TV knows about me.

Review content via Apple TV
Now this wouldn’t have to be a full on review, a simple star rating system for you to review what you’ve just watched.

Marking purchases
One thing that annoys me is that if I’m buying programmes from a series I have to check back with My TV programmes to check what I have or haven’t got yet. I know it comes up with an alert if you are re-buying something but that could be quite time consuming. If there was a simple icon next to an episode you’ve bought.

Alerts
For example I’m watching Season 5 of Entourage and Season 6 is out in December on Apple TV. It would be great if I could either pre-order a season pass or simply get a little alert when I next turn the box on letting me know that it’s now available for download.

Another nice touch would be to have the ability to flag movies you’d like to watch or download using Apple TV when they’re realeased. I know that there could be a horrific amount of time inbetween when you watch a movie trailer to when it’s actually released but you never know it could be quite useful. Maybe just having the ability to ’save a trailer’ into a favourites folder would be enough.

Season Passes
Now these are all well and good but generally I use Apple TV to discover new programmes that have either been suggested to me by a friend, I’ve wondered what it was like or I actually know I want to watch it. The problem with a season pass or buying an entire series is that you don’t want to fork all that cash out on something you’re not sure you’d like.

At the moment if I buy two episodes of a TV series and I then decide that rather than either going through and buying each episode individually I want to get a season pass or buy the entire series. The problem with this is that if you do that you are paying AGAIN for the episodes you originally bought. All good for Apple I’m sure but it’s a bit of a piss take to charge you twice!

Ordering programmes
Looking through my list of TV programmes for some reason is displays various seasons of programmes in random orders. I want it to display the most recent first (or last), I want to have the choice to do both.

I think the most interesting thing is what exactly is going to happen when the UK goes fully digital in 2012. Who would want to pay a license fee to the BBC when they can get all of this other content over the web directly into their televisions. I’d much rather fork out the equivalent for the license fee on some sort of license for my Apple TV. At least then you’re not going to have a few over-paid fuckwits like Jonathan Ross but hopefully see it spread out more evenly across the industry.

Either way I love my Apple TV, the biggest problem is the damage that it’s doing to my credit card!

The new, shiney Trusted Places went live today and we’re proud to say that Caffeinehit played a big part in the new site design and fresh UI design.

Following on from the relaunch of Qype last week I think TrustedPlaces has the upper hand, visually (obviously). Still a long way to go but with the site bringing in close to 1,000,000 uniques a month it’s just going from strength to strength.

As with all social networks it’s going to be interesting to see the reaction of the community that use it. When the latest version of Facebook was released the general feeling was that it wasn’t any better, maybe more confusing if anything else. Fingers crossed the reaction will be different in this case, with a much cleaner product it should make finding and understanding content a lot easier.

Either way, well done guys. The site’s looking great and I know that it’s just going to get better based on the plans you’ve got and the super team you’ve got working on the product.

Check out the new look TrustedPlaces here.

Well, it’s not very often I get as excited about something as I am with the new Gighit. It’s been a long time in the making, most of the time just bubbling away at the back of my head. NOW those thoughts are becoming a reality.

Alen and I have been working tirelessly for the last 2 months on the new Gighit. Designing, coding and now plugging in all of the bells and whistles that are going to make this website (hopefully) rock your social worlds.

I’m not going to reveal anything yet other than the logo (above), even though it’s been bouncing around for a few months on the web THIS is it’s official ‘launch’.

Other than that I can reveal the new beast is being coded in Python/Django and will be hitting your monitors in December 2008. When it’s live we will let you know here first!

I have been messing about Ubiquity for the first time today and what a nice, intuitive suprise it was!

After a very simple and easy install I was up and running. I must admit this isn’t something I could see less tech-savvy people using, but I guess that’s not really who it’s aimed at. The way it enhances the web and integrates with all of your web applications is really interesting, something very ‘different’.

I guess the next big question is what the uptake will be like from developers and web services. It has the potential to be one of those web applications you wonder how you survived without before.

Download it here and have a go yourself.

I’ve just put the finishing touches to the new look Caffeinehit. I thought it was about time it had a bit of a sprucing up and spring clean. Being the 1st birthday and all it seemed a very suitable time!

It would be great to hear what you think, so leave some comments here…

Check it out here: www.caffeinehit.com

I was just using Google Maps, as I often do and spotted a new addition to the interface, a neat little dropdown giving the option of viewing photos AND wikipedia content on your maps.

Now, I know it’s only going to be a matter of time before they introduce browser type ‘add-ons’ to your Google maps but for the time being this is a seriously sexy addition. One issue that I have with Wikipedia is that there is no way to view location based content in any sort of context, to have it viewable on a map makes it seem somewhat relevant.

Not only does it add interest to the basic google maps it does look pretty cool at the same time. I know this is pretty common place with many mashups but it’s nice to see Google finally adding a little bit more to the basic Google Maps.

Another release via Caffeinehit Ltd is the new look last name pages for Kindo. The original design was made only for one country, Sweden. Now there is last name data for a number of countries there needed to be a page that was easy to add future countries to.

Anyway, here’s the design I came up with, since it’s launch traffic has sky-rocketed. Watch this space and while you’re at it, why not see if your surname is in one of the countries listed on the site.

More: Kindo Surname Pages

Another recent creative release from Caffeinehit Ltd was the photo gallery solution for Kindo.

Kindo is one of the fastest growing family tree websites on the internet, their recent release of photo albums is set to increase their web traffic even more. The final design was designed to be simple and allow users to easily browse and share their photos with their family.

I can’t wait to hear how people react to it, Kindo is becoming such a massive website it really does make it a great testing ground for my designs and UI solutions. Let’s see how this one goes.

Check out Kindo here: www.kindo.com