Letters from the Equator

Sorry to all my readers, I’m back to the ‘misty look’ theme again. The old one was really fancy, but a lot of people found it hard to navigate, and since I don’t read my blog as much as others do, I decided to switch back and step back to think about my blog again.

One of the things I liked about the purple ‘aggregado’ theme was the treatment of different social graph feeds on the sidebar, allowing me to place my delicious, twitter, flickr, facebook and other feeds alongside my regular content.

That, and the highly stylized ‘swoosh’ in the background.

But, it would be ironic to maintain a website that gave people usability problems, especially when I claim to have interests in pursuing a long-term career in the user experience industry.

But since this is a personal blog, I shall expound on what I felt was a bad start to the day. Firstly, I shouldn’t have gotten up late, but I did. And I got an email from my dad telling my family members to view photos on his Flickr account, which was fine, except that a lot of my family members aren’t very ‘techie’ (even if they claim to be)… and I could see from a mile away that there would be potential problems about people wanting to download photos to print out (after all, they are family photographs).

I decided not to intervene, since it’s always good to allow people to figure things out for themselves, but my cousin shot a email almost instantly about the download problem. So, I go ‘step 1 – do this…’ and so on.

This was a precursor to an email I got from a reader I’ve not met before about how my blog was not easy to navigate. While I was humbled that people would read my blog, I was also faced with the decision about my blog template.

It just looks stupid to keep changing themes all the time, but sometimes people are left with no choice simply because building templates from scratch takes up a lot of time.

But also, I was faced with the fact that my whole life from this point on will be about making the user experience better – as though it were a life mission. And it is, because I wouldn’t be in London otherwise.

So, I made the decision to switch back to the old template and swallow my pride. And I learnt some important lessons along the way. Flashy graphics don’t always make a good page, although I learnt in Affective Interaction today that Jordan’s emotion framework is a good way to design products. And conventional sites don’t have to be ugly or un-pliable.

I’ll be making a few modifications so that I can get my social graph feeds on the current template.

Now, don’t get me started on ‘why white?’.