So. Vacation! We flew to San Diego a week ago last Wednesday to visit my father for his 80th birthday. We spent most of Thursday and Friday with him and had a good time.

On Saturday we drove to Hollywood to take a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House, built for the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall in around 1922. The design is radical for its time. We also drove by three other homes designed by Mr. Wright around Hollywood, the Ennis House, Storer House, and Freeman House.

Frank Lloyd Wright on breaking the box

Frank Lloyd Wright on intellectuals

Ennis House

Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles

Hollyhock House

I like this Abisko washbasin. It's designed to deliberately cascade the water out the side and into a drain in the floor. Aside from reconnecting the user to the process of water pouring over your hands and into the ground, which is what I like most about it, the drain makes you aware of how much water you're using.

This washbasin is delightful.

On this credit card swiper the customer is initiatlly presented with Yes and No buttons in the keypad. But later in the transaction the customer is also presented with software Yes and No choices that attempt to direct them to the unlabeled buttons to the left of the screen. The store, tired of telling customers how to finish their transactions, has labeled the device with yet another Yes.

By providing ambigious feedback and letting the user have more than one choice (poor use of affordances) the device confuses and frustrates the user.

New identity & site design.

We're getting closer with the homepage design. Experimenting with photos and colors. The navigation colors may change - it feels a little cold as it is.

In this example I’ve used a tabbed navigation that leverages user familiarity with this model. It's not terribly avante garde, but Windermere's demographic spans groups with different levels of computing experience. I've alluded to the tab shape, making them visible but not obtrusive. At the same time, the colors chosen and the background form lets the UI stay out of the way until the user needs it.

I thought I’d share some of my design process on the path to the new Windermere homepage. I take a collaborative approach to design and rely on the strong balance of talents on our UX team to weigh in as we go along.

Existing design. This was our starting point.

This is the first homepage design I came up with. It offered a handful of improvements over the old design, but it was complicated, cramped, and frankly didn’t look Windermere:

Process/unplug. We had a design review just before I was to leave on a two-week vacation, a 2800 mile road trip with my father. Paradoxically, one of the easiest ways for a designer to improve a design is to put it down for awhile, work on something else, and come back to it later. On a plane during the trip I turned over the Alaska Airlines in-flight magazine to discover a Windermere ad. What struck me about it was the sense of casual familarity in the design. Inspired, I pulled out my journal and sketched this:

Dinner Party. When I returned to the office I built this out:

I recently designed a new set of map icons for Windermere.com to be included in a future release. One of my goals is that they be easy enough to understand that a legend is not needed.

I’ve just begun a project working with the Windermere Real Estate people here in Seattle to make their search utility easier to use. The existing design had three columns or tabs of information - search, summary, and listings. The labels are a little bit confusing, but one of the other issues to be addressed was the “update listings” button.

I’m liking the look of the Mazda Nagare Concept Car. To my eye (and heart) it looks like an update to the Honda CRX. Can’t wait to drive one. Or whatever Honda builds to beat it.

There are three homes in Washington state designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. They are almost never open to the public. One of...