Hey Phil,
I'll send along some of the details about the outlying stuff on the experience design pages as soon as I can. For now, the frontpage design ( http://www.openplans.org/projects/melkjug/homepage ) as well as refinement of the existing ui is fair game.
For overall look, I'd mainly like to see something clean, consistent and lighter feeling. I'm looking for friendly looking, goofy and pretty easy going. I like Seb's description "tounge-in-cheek web 2.0". Cartooney-cute things like things like twitter, pownce, and digg's titlebar come to mind.
In terms of the feed/filter list interface, I think many of our analogues are probably searchy sites. I like http://www.snooth.com, they seem to have done a good job of packing up a lot of options and not making it seem too overwhelming and making it smooth and fun feeling. Everyone seems to like kayak alot, I think it's super useful and certainly a benchmark, but I'd like to avoid that kind of clutteryness. Most of these sites put an emphasis on the search controls, I'd like to see the stuff that's there be present and functional, but not a distraction from reading when things are tuned properly. I'm not nuts about it overall, but thoof.com also has very similar widgets peppered into it's articles that may be worth looking at.
Overall the current model for the reader interface is just a blog -- I've been pretty happy with that so far and I think following whatever guidelines you would normally use to design a nice clean modern blog will serve us well here. Right now it feels kind of bulky, clunky and overwrought. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I personally find the frontpage of things like http://daylife.com below the fold to be too austere, monotonous and bland. I'd like to see it retain a bit of personality throughout.
Glad to (attempt to) clarify any of my extremely vague subjective descriptions.
Hope it helps? - Luke -- Archive: http://www.openplans.org/projects/melkjug/lists/melkjug-development-list/archive/2008/07/1216929661023 To unsubscribe send an email with subject "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] for questions.
