Web Interface Design

I’ve been mulling over how I could merge the celebrity news and deviant art portraits in a really clever way. I decided that the news on its own was definitely not strong or interesting enough.

I think the way I’m going to do it is by creating a celebrity ‘scrapbook’ website.

The user will type in the name of the celebrity, then a page will load with latest news and the portrait. The design will be like a scrapbook, so the news headlines will be delivered in a newspaper clippings style pasted into a scrapbook, and the portrait will be on the facing ‘page’ of the scrapbook like it’s been drawn in or stuck in.

I really hope what I’m planning to with the design is achievable, because without the design, the idea goes down the toilet.

So I still like my idea about the celebrity news mash up, but how can I push it further?

I can’t figure out any way to incorporate something interesting like Google maps.

What about a site that delivers celebrity news, but also popular trends for the day/week/month?

A search function?

Just stumbled across this mashup http://www.doodlebuzz.com/ which is a news delivery site, but instead of just streaming the news onto the page, you search for a topic, such as ‘Obama’ then you create a doodle on the page by just clicking and dragging the mouse around, then it delivers the headlines around the path of your doodle. I really like the idea however when I actually tried to read the individual articles it was very hard and I couldn’t quite work it out.

I would like to use some feature like this, but I also want people to be able to read the news, so I guess from this I can start thinking about more interesting ways for the news to be delivered but keep in mind that I don’t want this to get in the way of the site actually being functional.

Maybe people could search the site for news, but it could also pull artwork of the famous person from deviant art, and show the news in an interesting way combined with the image? There are about a million portraits of every celebrity I can think of off the top of my head. So that should work quite well. But how can I combine the news and the portrait in an interesting way?

On a more serious note… this is a mash up with a social conscience.

“An exploration of the relative value of five dollars by collecting Flickr photos from around the world of things that cost the equivalent of $5.”

That’s a mash up that really gets you thinking.  For some reason it looks like this site is no longer functioning, but I read about it on the mashup awards site.

I decided the easiest way to come up with an idea for my mash up was to think of things that would actually find useful in my daily life.

I was trying to think about what kind of things I waste a lot of time doing on the internet that could somehow be condensed into one place.

Don’t laugh at me, but one of those things is reading celebrity gossip on various websites. I don’t know why I love doing this, I can’t explain it, but I just do. Especially around the time that assignments are due, I could waste hours on end reading about things like Kim Kardashian’s love life.

I wonder if I could create a mash up where news feeds from various celebrity gossip sites were filtered into one (such as TMZ, Perez Hilton, ninemsn, even twitter). It could also contain a search function where you can search for gossip on a particular celebrity or particular topic.

What do you think, Kim????

I think this mash up is quite innovative and funny at the same time - http://lolwr.us/ -

It pulls pictures of cats from Flickr under the creative commons license (smart!) then you can search for keywords from Twitter posts such as “kitty” and match the twitter post with a cat picture which may or may not result in a hilarious LOLCAT. 

This is a good example of a mash up that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but is still extremely clever and well thought out.

The site is very simple to use - I had no idea what I was doing but I managed to make a LOLCAT within about 1 minute. So obviously the way they have designed the site works really well too.

The navigation is plain and simple:  “make one!”     “log in”      “about”

It doesn’t get much easier than that. There is very little room for error when navigating this site, so it makes the experience and the mash up all that more appealing.

You can have the most amazing mash up idea in the world and ruin it with a badly functioning site. In the same way, you could have a relatively simple mash up idea and make it awesome with an awesome, easy to use site. I guess that was the point of the first assignment task!  It’s not just about the idea, it’s about executing it well.