Facebook, like many of us, has done some spring cleaning. They announced a new timeline, newsfeed and  search (they call “Graph Search”).

In 2011 Chris Taylor wrote “Facebook is Too D*** Complicated”. Facebook acquired the dreaded disease: feature creep. More features, icons, tools and everything was getting smaller and smaller. Places, Marketplace, Apps, Gifts, Timeline, Video Chat. Everything was crowded. The core experience of interacting with friends suffered.

“Engineers, bless their hearts, want to give us access to all the exciting new functions they’ve come up with. But they’re not great at making them simple enough for the average user, or at removing the buttons we no longer need. When a company does have the courage and discipline to slash away at its engineers’ wish lists, and adhere to the KISS principle of design (Keep It Simple, Stupid), it can rise head and shoulders above its rivals and delight its users. Apple is a great example of that, as is Nintendo (the Wii being one of the most simple — and successful — game console designs of all time.)

“Unfortunately for its 800 million users, Facebook does not appear to be that kind of company. It used to be, and its inherent simplicity was part of the reason it was so successful. But now it is falling victim to feature creep — and a roster of settings that are becoming increasingly complex.”

Luckily Facebook got wise.

In the book, Rework,  Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson suggest:

“Underdo the competition…Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition. Instead of one-upping, try one-downing. Instead of outdoing, try underdoing.”

Order has been restore to the Facebook universe.

We just released a new video about the Senior Art Show experience for a few students. Our videographer, John Worthington, filmed and edited it. I helped plan and interview. I love how it turned out: good interviews, intriguing b-roll, beautiful compositions and solid storytelling.

After 9 months of pregnancy and 14+ heroic hours of labor Leah delivered our new baby girl. She’s so beautiful. The video is of her just an hour after being born. She has dark brown hair, dark blue eyes and weights 9.5 pounds and is 21.5 inches long. We’re quite happy and exhausted. We’re working on a name for her. :) So begins the adventure.

UPDATE: We named her Liora June.

UPDATE: She’s more than a month old and she’s changed a lot.

Photos by Lindsey Morgan and Dinah Rogers.

“Well-loved products on the web share a similar design aesthetic, with roughly the same kinds of bevels, inset shadows, and drop shadows. For designers, achieving this level of “lickable” interface is a point of pride. For us, and for a minority of UI designers out there, it feels wrong.

For many of us, it seems self-evident that you should approach product building with a certain kind of discipline. You cut your product features down to the bone, but you never approach your interface design the same way. Why create a small gem of a product and then weigh it down with design flourishes? The way you design your site should reflect your values — be consistent. Flat design is lean design”

Somehow the flat design trend caught hold of even Microsoft (as evident in their latest Windows 8). Some screenshots are striking in their simplicity. Even Outlook, which I avoid at work like the plague (because of it’s bad design and user experience) now has a minimal flat reduced design.

What about all the delicious details designers swoon over?  Mac icons are known for their subtle, delightful details; slight shadows, gradients, glints, you know the drill. Icons from Apple are  very detailed, perfectly crafted, 3d and lifelike.

Kara Zichittella and Andrew McCarthy redesigned the Mac app icons flat.  ”The icons are very flat and minimal but with just enough detail in them to have their own identity. There’s no unnecessary colors, shadows or gradients in these apps.” It’s pretty interesting to see.

As Allan hopes are we opening to a “flat design era”? We’ll have to wait and see.

Overall I think it’s a great design. It follows the subway design tradition started by New York City metro map designer Massimo Vignelli. London and many other major cities follow that design too.

The design of subway maps always fascinates me.

Here you can see more on the case study.

Working at a university I get a wide variety of projects. This week I had to quickly brand an upcoming fundraising race “5k for 5k” hosted at Southern Virginia March 16. It was definitely a fun project to work on. The background photo is by Russ Dixon a great photographer who occasionally comes to campus.

I looked it up. Lo and behold it’s true. Dan McKinley, Principle Engineer at Etsy, talked recently about how they tried infinite scroll for their search listings with A/B testing and it caused users to purchase less. They were baffled by the result.

Later they designed a new approach for browsing categories. They used modular A/B testing to analyze each piece and the effect. Most pieces did positively effect sales, though a few surprisingly didn’t.

His takeaway: use modularized testing. If you are making significant changes on a large site, test each piece separately.

Bootstrap is a front-end framework from the developers at Twitter. It’s popularity among web developers and design continues to grow. Lately I’ve looked into it’s impressive features:

• base css for type, links, forms, buttons and grid system
• css components like dropdowns, navbars, paginations, alerts and progress bars
• jQuery plugins like tabs, alerts, accordian, tooltip, carousel

Honestly, it’s a great kit.

Usually these frameworks have been bloated, excessive and use confusing markup. Features of frameworks are sometimes interdependent, so paring down is hard to do. Bootstrap seems to dodge this issue with excellent written markup and few files. There’s even a customizable download.