1996 Web Site

In 1996 I grew more interested in the new technologies that were becoming available on the Web. I started to focus on different ways to implement these technologies in the web site. Up until this time I had felt that the experience on the Web was still pretty static and boring and I really wanted to create something that could have the experience that a CD ROM application could have, something that would excite people and inspire them to tell their friends and colleagues to visit the site.

I had been experimenting with using Macromedia's new Director Shockwave plug-in for a while and I was eager to implement it into the web site. I had come up with the idea that there should be a way to display type online in a user-controlled environment. I experimented with a number of effects to try to achieve this. What I really wanted was to implement some way for the user to be able to type a word in a certain font. Nobody was doing this back then and I was really excited about the idea.

Unfortunately, the truth was still pretty ugly. Shockwave was still not ready for prime time and even though there were some really big design studios using it, the user experience was still hampered by the half-hour download required for the plug-in.

Macromedia had also released another Shockwave product at the time, called Shockwave for Freehand. Utilizing Freehand's vector graphics, this plug-in would display a Freehand file in a web browser. Since Flash did not yet exist, this was new and exciting stuff. The plug-in was not large at all compared to the shockwave plug-in and it had the added benefit of having a built in interface that seemed custom designed to solve almost all of my problems.

The interface for Shockwave for Freehand wasn't completely bad; it had the basics that I needed. The users could zoom in and zoom out, and also move the image around the screen.

The only noticeable shortcoming of Shockwave for Freehand was its total lack of anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is necessary when displaying vector information on a raster image. Without it, the lines are drawn with stair-stepped graphics and do not accurately represent the shape. The controls for Freehand were also pretty complicated to describe if you didn't want to use their control bar, which was rather large. So I created a test version of the site and showed it to a couple of friends, asking them for feedback. Without implementing Macromedia's controls, even with the rather large instructions bar displayed, nobody understood what the Shockwave stuff actually did, and they didn't see the benefit of using it.

Multimedia content on a web site in 1996 was still a relatively new thing, and many users might have never encountered it before. I suspect that a lot of the resistance I got was due to a lack of explanation on my part that the user had new technology in front of them. My solution to this was to try and create an interface that you couldn't help but want to interact with. I thought that the more I could make things appear interactive, the more people would reason that they were interactive.

My rough design for this site looked a lot like the popular "spirit of '76" radios and phones that were coming out at that time. I liked the look and felt that it displayed the same pioneering spirit that I was going for with the use of plug-ins and new technology. The addition of switches and buttons and rollover dials was really fun, but the end result turned out to be way too large to release. Modems were still realistically at 14,400 and people were starting to resent when sites required long downloads.

I had put about a week's worth of work into the site already, so I didn't want to throw the site design completely out the window, but I certainly couldn't release anything so large and unwieldy. My solution was to eliminate most of the graphics and highlight the Shockwave content.

1995 Web Site
Usability: the Site Speaks For Itself
1996 Web Site (Cont.)