Clutter prevents teaching

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

To those who don’t know, I run an online community called Crysandrea. In Crysandrea, we have a pretty cool game so users can play when the forums are lonely. While designing the game, I decided to explain to the users how to play the forest, so I built a tour they would be redirected to when they play the game for the first time.

The current tour page looks like this:

Current Crysandrea tour layout.

The idea is nice, but how many users will really read all of that? When I was designing it this seemed like a good idea. I’m giving plenty of information for everyone to understand the game as much as possible, but as it turns out, only around 3% of our users actually read the entire thing.

After realizing I was designing a business-like document, I declared: “This must be re-aligned to be scan-friendly“. After spending 10 minutes drawing some simple wireframes, I was quite happy with this little kindergarten-like sketch.

Crysandrea Wireframe

Once I release the new design, I’ll be sure to post and explain why the page is designed the way it was.


Good ol’ me.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Hi there!

For those who don’t know me quite well, I’m Tyler Diaz. A creative web designer who loves making things easier and simpler to use for the rest of the web.

This is my new blog, Code & Theory, where you will most likely find my written words about design or some hand crafted code I have built, or found awesome.