foomandoonian

Circulation Realms

Circulation realms refer to the navigational structures in buildings that reduce the sense of disorientation one feel when moving through a large sterile building. These circulation realms should grow progressively smaller as one goes deeper into the building, and they should be named appropriately so that you can direct someone by telling then which realms to pass through.

In Web design, this applies specifically to the navigational structure. Create realms that members pass through to reach one area of the website or another, with progressively smaller sections and pages. The main difference with a website, though, is that you will also want to create shortcuts to the inner parts that are used most frequently, bypassing several realms in between.

Common Areas at the Heart

Every group needs a common area where they can congregate. This space can be semi-public or restricted to group members. But it should serve as a common meeting place for group members.

Communities as a whole need these types of spaces, too. That’s generally accomplished through fully public areas, such as the promenade mentioned above.

I usually hate analogies, but this one seems to work really well. An analogy is only really valuable when it makes you think about something familiar in a different way, and I found myself doing exactly that a lot with this article. Great stuff.

In our analysis of Rand’s effective face-to-face presentation we noticed that he needed at least five minutes to make the case for SEOmoz PRO. Yet the existing web page was more like a one-minute summary. Once we added the key elements of Rand’s presentation, the page became much longer:

It’s interesting to note that Amazon.com, which is known for its relentless testing, tends to have extremely long product pages. Just see the page for its Kindle reader.

There’s a lot of useful information in this article, but this page length comparison and the technique of writing copy with ‘curiosity rather than overt “buy me” language’ were the big takeaways for me.

Microsoft also tested multiple versions of blue for links in their search results. A specific color of blue (#0044CC) drove $80-$100 million dollars a year increase over the light blue the design team tried first.

Andrew references Douglas Bowman in his post, who quit Google’s design team, citing an example of the time the company did extensive testing to pick from 41 shades of blue. It seems that perhaps Google have it right.