Lessons from redesign of Blogger

StopDesign has a nice story on their experiences doing the new Blogger.com design.

What I find delighting is the talk about providing “helpful directions”, something which Basecamp also does a great job of with “Things you can do that you haven’t done yet” and other similar features.

Specifically, Blogger.com’s quick description of what a blog is (” A blog is your easy-to-use web site, where you can quickly post thoughts, interact with people, and more.”), combined with the quick tour is excellent.

What I’m thinking, of course, is that this is something we should do for .LRN as well, not just on the dotlrn.org site, but also as part of the software itself, so that both students and professors at a school using .LRN can immediately learn what the software does and how, and get started right away, without any additional help.

Apart from that, despite being a bit on the heavy side for my taste, I really like Blogger.com’s rounded corners, large icons, and most other aspects about the new design by AdaptivePath and Stopdesign.