All I wanted to see and had to squint really hard to see was this:

• NYC Weekly
• Brooklyn
• New York City Waterfalls
• Brooklyn Heights Promenade
• Greenpoint YMCA
• Union Pool
• McCarren Park Pool
• New York Aquarium
• The Yard
• Brooklyn Social

…all of which I am quite interested in…but the words around what is otherwise a list are too distracting. If they can cut out 3/4 of the text in that email and work on the info design a little bit, I would so read it…but for now…not so much.

Also, what’s the difference between the radar on the left and the content on the right?

Yelp should take a lesson from the Rotten Tomatoes anti-playbook and keep their newsletter short, terse, and sweet rather than transforming it into a editorial hurricane that dissolves their initial business model: provide users a way to upload, share, search, and bookmark reviews of things. Seeing as how RT changed their design and have not yet reverted to the older, more effective version, they’re a lost cause.

On the web: distill, don’t dissolve. That sounds tacky, but seriously.

We are starting to work on a complete overhaul of the Parsons website - front and back. Parsons is part of The New School where I am part of the core university web team…which means that we have a university-wide CMS that we get to implement and play with. We also have lots of technology we have developed for other schools that we can apply to the Parsons redesign.

Some of the tasks include, but are not limited to, setting a timeline, managing resources, running meetings, hiring consultants, communicating to stakeholders…and that’s just for the project planning stages. Future tasks will include working on IA, UI, UX, art direction, and editorial oversight. My roles in this project are similar to the ones I have for the other college websites I run at The New School: Eugene Lang College and The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music.

Here is a screengrab of the current site that I manage:

I currently work at The New School where I manage several college website as well as design new features and functionality for the university. Recently, I designed a dynamic video, audio, and photo delivery system for the university - all content can be shared/published across its eight colleges, as well. Additionally, I will be building an iTunes U channel to host and promote the same content.

Above is a tabbed javascript/Flash gallery that interfaces with the photosharing website, Flickr. Visit The New School’s Flickr page to see how the content appears outside the university context. Our video content is hosted by Blip.tv and audio will be hosted by Soundcloud (as soon as they’re open to the public).

Web 2.0/Social Strategy

The New School’s CMS currently does not offer social networking capabilities. Furthermore, the university is not yet ready to delve into community management on the web. We also don’t have a lot of hosting space for rich media on our servers. In come Web 2.0 services: Flickr and other web hosting services offer The New School a web2.0-licious public presence as well as a public API with which we can develop unique applications for our websites. In other words, we don’t need a team of programmers to develop cool things…we can mooch off of what the fine folks at Yahoo/Flickr have already developed and tweak to our needs.

And a great biproduct is that we can tap into existing social networks to distribute content and communicate with users. As far as universities go, while people still turn to official websites for information, their decisions can also be affected by what kind of presence the university has across the web. So if the website that houses our snapshots also taps into a huge social network of engaged users, all the better.

UX Design

The backend for this system acts as a university-wide multimedia content library. I designed it so that content editors could add/edit content centrally through our CMS and syndicate content throughout The New School’s college websites. Here is how a similar content offering looks when it is published on Eugene Lang College’s website:

or embedded on the Jazz school’s homepage:

At The New School, I manage the website for Eugene Lang College, the university’s liberal arts school. I design and build out all new features, oversee usability issues, and produce/oversee new content.

Case Study:

When I started to work on the site, it had just been redesigned. While it looked visually stunning (especially for a college website, which is often an oxymoron), information was difficult to find. I set out to restructure the site’s information architecture with the user in mind. In other words, I wanted to make the architecture reflect user paths rather than the school’s bureaucracy and administrative organization.

What I ended up doing was splitting up an otherwise bloated Academics section into Academics and Student life. I then created a sidebar system that would relate similar pages based on results from informal card sorts. In the end, content is primarily located in certain places, but easier to find from other pages on the site.

What we had, in the very end, was a template and system for creating and managing Student Life sections at other college websites at The New School:

Process (simplified, of course):

Above is a graphic illustrating the process of splitting up a bloated section of the website into two cleaner sections. The scribbled up diagrams illustrate what it is like to sit through meetings with Deans and top administrative officials at a university.

Here is a list of some resources I would give students…I’ll upload my talk/outline soon.

Map Examples

• Ushahidi.com – maps out post-election violence in Kenya, realt-time, participatory
  http://www.ushahidi.com

• Health Care That Works
  Call to action: email state officials
  http://www.healthcarethatworks.org/maps/nyc/

• NYC Bike Maps
  Goal: create awareness/connection of/between bikes and lived environment
  http://www.nycbikemaps.com/spokes/

• Mapeo – maps out YouTube videos on google map (has API)
  http://mappeo.net

• Zipcode Finder, Ben Frye – built with Processing
  http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/zipdecode/

• Wikipedia Vision – watch wikipedia edits mapped out in realtime
  http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html

• Outside.in – maps out location-based blog data from across the web
  http://www.outside.in

• Yelp.com ­– visualizes user-generated reviews/data in google map mashup
  http://www.yelp.com

• Crimespotting, Stamen Design
  http://www.crimespotting.org

Mashup Tools and Resources

• The Mechanism - tutorial, presentation, and podcast on how to build a google maps mashup
  http://themechanism.com/blog/2008/01/25/ny-web-standards-meetupweb-mapping-part-one-google-maps/

• Programmable Web - Tutorial and list of APIs
  http://www.programmableweb.com/howto

• Heatmap generator
  http://imagine-it.org/google/geoiqmap.html

• Engadget Tutorial
  http://www.engadget.com/2005/03/08/how-to-make-your-own-annotated-multimedia-google-map/

• GPS Visualizer - Draw a Google Map from a GPS file
  http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/map?form=google

• Google Maps API - code, tutorials, documentation
  http://code.google.com/apis/maps/index.html
  tutorial: http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=74725&topic=11364

• Smile (MIT) – JSON framework for data visualiztion and google map integration
  http://simile.mit.edu/exhibit/examples/presidents/presidents-2.html

• Processing – open source language/environment for making cool stuff
  http://processing.org/

• GSV(Giant-Ass Image Viewer) – make infinite size images scalable/draggable
  http://mike.teczno.com/giant/pan/

• How GPS Works
  http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gps.htm

• Flickr Developer Tools
  http://www.flickrbits.com/

• Flickr API
  http://flickr.com/services/api/

• Trippermap – flickr/flash mashup tool
  http://www.trippermap.com/

• U.S. Census Factifinder - maps and data! download! use!
  http://factfinder.census.gov/jsp/saff/SAFFInfo.jsp?_pageId=thematicmaps&_submenuId=maps_0

At The New School, we are one-by-one redesigning all of the individual college websites. Using a new CMS and university-wide branding/wireframing guidelines, we are trying to give each school’s website its own unique look and feel, while tying it to the university as a whole in both visual style and function.

A recent redesign was for The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. As principal creative on the project, I created a site that uses graphical elements inspired by mid-century jazz album art. The site feels fun, dynamic, and classic, while retaining the clean, modern aesthetic that The New School strives for in all its promotional media.

Old Site:

Here is a screenshot of their old site that was built with frames and old-school HTML, had no clear hierarchy, no visual or editorial continuity, and provided a confusing user experience.

Just a sketch…I’ll turn it into something more fleshed out whenever I have some free time….mmm…free time…

Simply put, I wanted to play around with string synths. Enjoy.