jtgillia said:

Co-sign.

The only thing that really bugs me is that it's slow But I just bookmarked the 4 main areas & the message board. Works fine once I'm logged in but I do hope they'll have some kind of site map eventually...

tackam said:

Although I see your point about the fact that the site is a music club, and doesn't need to follow all the rules of "corporate" website design... there are some fundamentals worth considering when you undertake a project such as this.

1. Remember that computers and the web in general has a fairly well-established and well-understood user interface. Asking people to learn a new interface is not always a good idea.

2. Bandwidth usage = money. Although I have a nice fast ADSL net connection at home, I'd never consider accessing NPGMC from my laptop over mobile / GPRS because it is charged per kilobyte. On the other hand, I read Prince.org on my travels all the time. Other people around the world will be paying for their internet usage differently, and it is somewhat exclusionary to only provide an all-singing version of a site.

3. Extending from point #2, people should know what a link will bring them to before the click it. Otherwise the whole thing feels very random and frustrating. Imagine if the only way to find out what type of soup you were buying at a supermarket was to queue up, buy it, open the can and taste it

4. If defining a very abstract user interface, it should always be clear to users from glancing at it what items are "clickable" and what are not. Some of the early point-and-click adventure games suffered badly from this... e.g. in Monkey Island you'd have to scan the mouse pointer all over the screen to find out what is "clickable" and what is not. There has to be way of representing this more effectively to the user. NPGMC is successful in some ways with this - the iconography of the ceramic pot meaning "back" and the circular window meaning "home" works reasonably well once you understand it. However I feel it should be painfully clear to the user what they can select and what they can't, because although exploring a big house looking for stuff to play with is fun, battling with a "clever" user interface by having to drag your mouse all over the screen isn't (not if you suffer from RSI problems for example haha). Hyperlinks are very simple and they are effective for that reason. Making it less obvious what a user can interact with and how a user can navigate through the site just puts unnecessary obstacles in front of the user. There's no need for it.

5. Creating a heavy site like this alienates people with special requirements. This includes people on low-end PCs, or with low-bandwidth internet connectivity. Worse still, it frustrates people with disabilities, for example if you are blind and have a dictation tool for reading websites to you, a totally graphics-heavy flash site obviously isn't going to work. Of course you can't please everyone with every website, but there are standards and common practices in web design and they exist for a reason. Familiarity = understandable and standard = well supported.

By no means am I having a go at NPGMC, just saying there are these issues to consider when tackling a commercial website.

By the way I am not a web design professional so I could be talking out of my arse However I make videogames for a living so I tend to think about user interfaces, gesture recognition, user feedback and such issues quite a lot.

ian said:

Well said Ian! All your points pretty much cover how I feel as well!

TheP said:

I agree, but for free? Naw, quality should be rewarded. Pixius seems professional. But the graphics, you know the rooms and environment are awesome in the NPGMC. Just that the intro stuff was probably done in the end very hastily.

There seems to be alot of work and effort placed on the 3D environments which again are amazing work, but little thought into the typography and overall initial homepage flow and design. And I'm not talking about the rooms or the map or whole environment of the NPGMC.com site, no just that typography is design in many ways and it's Crucial.

If done right it can ENHANCE the design and experience of the rest of the artwork! Like a cohesive element that elevates and frames other elements. In certain rooms I've seen though it's ALL well done, fabulous effort to make a great experience for fams. I'm appreciative for that and for the price, heck it's a great deal!

A CD ROM would cost you about the same to join plus all the perks and future perks.

The intro Flash is rather un-reflective of the rest of the site. Just doesn't capture the essence of the site and seems odd and ambigious. If anything, the user thinks it's going to be some galaxy thing with breaking superstitions along the way...? Could be showing casual surfers how awesome and great the site REALLY is.

And again, the guards with the swords pointing them at you if you don't log-in with the right password...I still don't know about that. Anyway...

Well, at least they're communicating promptly and clearly. I have to give them that, both Pixius and Prince's company for communicating.

I think that in itself is professional.

So they didn't spell checklk! Big deal.



/////
[This message was edited Sun Apr 20 18:40:53 PDT 2003 by FlyingCloudPassenger]

Me too... successful company here... but I got out of being a partner because my interest is not in this specific type of creativity...

usability... hits... branding... leave that to businessmen...

DeVaniti said:[quote]

ufoclub said:

rio said:

yeah, sure couldn't tell exactly what is on the npgmc site from what's been written over the last couple of days...

WHY do we always let it get 2 this point? rio + velvet splash - hug and make up right now, or Im sending u 2 your bedrooms with no milk and cookies!

I know I may not be as bright as some of you here but, I happen to like the way the new website looks. I liked trying to find things on my own. Nothing about Prince is easy. I'm used to it.

Ditto - altho, I agree with what velvet spalsh said about it bein cool 4 1997, and not 2003 - a valid point, so now Im mo' confused than ever!!!

I am a real estate appraiser,not a web designer, so when I go into a building I walk around on my own to view things. I don't want a guide, although sometimes I do need one, and in this case (like the cd rom game ) I just want to roam freely. I like the site.
Could someone tell me the significance of the dog in backyard destroying the demos???

They should add a guest section to the site. Where there's some news and updates on what Prince is up to. Something to entice people to join.

Raven said:

Hehe...yeah...even porn sites let ya take a tour before they ask ya for money

ahh its okay, its not that bad.. I kindof dig the gate with the little people holding swords


www.freechit.com <-CHECK IT OUT!

- put a simple discreet text navigation bar across the bottom

- shrink the graphics, each html page is almost 150k!

- Set the flash and HTML sites up so they are pulling information from one database. Instead of having to manually go in and change both sites each time they update, which they don't seem to be doing. The news and digital garden sections are empty in the HTML version.

- It looks like they don't have the 56k streaming versions encoded properly. I think the filesize and bitrate may be too high, because no matter what it streams painfully slow. If its like this the whole year, I might as well kiss these benefits goodbye. I left the VIP room last night after a half hour of skipping music that would play for 3 seconds then buffer for a minute, then play for 3 more seconds...

That said, I know the metaphorical approach to a web site is very dated, but in the case of a fan web site it offers the opportunity to hide things and plant suprises throughout the place, which in itself can be quite fun.

TheP said:

VelvetSplash said:

yeah man. WTF!

ian said:

Thanks Ian, well put...

VelvetSplash said:

That's the thing, tho...the npgmc isn't a "commerce website"...people don't go there like they go to Amazon.com...the only "commerce" aspect of it is the retail section, and that's pretty straightforward.

Many, MANY artist websites forego "ease of navigation" for the purposes of making each visit to their website an experience...it's obvious that Prince and his gang wanted just that...rolling your mouse over areas of each room is supposed to give the user the experience of discovery within the context of setting a theoretical "physical place" which houses the music club and its members...the navigation is, in reality, amazingly simple and intuitive...we don't need labels or underlined text to click on to achieve that.
[This message was edited Mon Apr 21 16:39:42 PDT 2003 by wellbeyond]

wellbeyond said:

Yyyyup! Blah, blah, blah.

The fact is, it IS a commercial website, because there is a fee charged for acess.

I like the site,( Even though parts of it remind me of the JW books I used to see of people sitting in paradise), but that's Prince's business, It is a lot more interesting, more fun,I like going from room to room.

I'm surprised noone has mentioned the dog barking and the little kids swimming pool with a rubber duckie.

TheP said:

I know what u mean. My addiction nearly choked me as well!