Design Rockstar

Had a great time today mingling with fellow bloggers at the Pavilion in Downtown Dubai.  It's great to have received an invitation for this pioneer casual get-together with the coolest people from Google Middle East & North Africa.


We started by introducing ourselves and what we blog about.  With us, and hosting the lunch is Google MENA Managing Director, Ari Kesisoglu and Google MENA Communications Manager, Hind Rasheed. It's interesting to know that among our small group, only a couple or 3 uses Arabic language primarily for their blogs. Reasonably, readership is a valid factor. Like here in Dubai, our target audience are mostly comprehensive in English. The demand for the information we provide comes largely from people who at least understand English, expats.  There would be a huge difference though if we talk about MENA region.  We've also talked briefly about smart phones being an accomplice of improving the way people access information.

Four Seasons Hotel Chain unveils one of the world's most, if not the most, expensive website that costs a whopping EIGHTEEN MILLION US DOLLARS ($18m) to develop. Wow! That's about 18,000 heavy websites for me to do to earn that. It would be interesting to see the breakdown of such expenditures, and the development timeline as well.

The landing page

The website boasts of a vibrant, dynamic and photographic look and feel. It has a lightweight booking engine. It loads relatively fast too. The photo jQuery slider looks too big though, it conflicts the call to action, which supposedly is the booking (Make a Reservation form). Especially the photo is intended to "recommend the destination," but isn't clickable at all.

It uses an instant social media sharing plugin from ShareThis. But I feel it still lacks "elements" of a really social-friendly website. The more popular Facebook Like/Recommend, Retweet and Google+ is evidently missing. One article say there are videos, but as I navigate, I haven't seen any. In terms of typography, the font used in headings, navigation and links (league-gothic-1) appears to be crisp and a bit pixelated to "my" eyes. Some pages use 4-5 combinations of font-family, font-weight and styles.

Econsultancy says: "Four Seasons’ revamp is part of an effort to improve online revenue - though its website attracts 30m visitors each year, online bookings only account for 12% of total revenue, an increase of just 2% in five years."

I'm not sure though about the returns it could generate in terms of booking directly on the site - as most travelers prefer to contact travel agencies or group bookings like Hotels.com, Expedia, Stay.com and the likes.

Generally, it's not bad at all - but not excellent overall. It is clean and not overcrowded. Photos are stunning. But user experience should be enhanced further.

The mobile version

The mobile home page (left); and an inner page (right)

The mobile version has a slick minimal design. However, it's quite noticeably image-heavy for a mobile site. Almost every page has a photo or 2. You will have an impression that you are browsing a mobile version of a magazine with a "booking" concept on the side.

World's Most Expensive Website?
TopSharePoint claims that US Gov's recovery.gov is the most expensive website also costing $18m. Ironically, the website is about tracking government spending and promoting transparency. The website "promises to give U.S. taxpayers more information about where their money is going." Apparently some of the money went to one of the most expensive website in the world.

If true, Four Season's website, http://preview.fourseasons.com, indeed is one of the most expensive website in the world.  Why don't they just outsource it to freelancers huh? :-)

Would you trade your entrusted friends emails in exchange for a 'chance' to win a fancy wrist watch worth just AED110 ($29)?

Watch this great video preview of the new Twitter design. I will have an experience blog about it after the, well, 'experience.'

The already-minimal design has been "simplified" more/less "to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover something new," says Twitter blog. The new design will be implemented on Twitter.com and mobile phones and Tweetdeck. Twitter also says that the new design is more dedicated to 'new users.' I'm wondering, who else aren't on Twitter yet? :-)


On what I've learned, all that's going on will be fit in to these 4 'tabs':

1. Home: an upgraded version of the news feed. Twitter aims reduce the number of clicks or page/tab turns to do an action, such as viewing TwitPics, TwitVids and other media contents. All these will be viewable on the feed and is just a click away now. 
2. Connect: @replies, mentions (and possibly retweets), and other related activities will be on this tab.
3. Discover: This tab will house the trending topics, hash tag searches; and this will also suggest topics based on your most frequent tweets, follows.
4. Me: It's you! A wider-scope social profile with your latest activities logged.

Visit http://fly.twitter.com/ to discover more for yourself. The new design is currently just available for iPhone and Android. But you can get early access on your computer by downloading and logging into Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android.  It will be available to all "in the coming weeks."

StumbleUpon is the latest social network that had undergone a face lift. A totally new website design, logo, and additional features welcomed me to my most preferred social bookmarking site today.

It's landing page has become graphical but neat. Basically the huge blocks are (categories of) interests. If Facebook asks, "What's on your mind?," and Twitter asks, "What's happening?,"  In the new StumbleUpon design, it asks, "What would you like to explore?" And you select from any of those 30 cool blocks of images - interests. So the other categories that we normally do not notice on the previous design now comes in equally inviting 'call to action'.

The toolbar, StumbleBar, is also minimally designed - and is more lightweight to the eye. It makes searching and stumbling handy.


The Profile Page is neat and orderly. Your eyes are glued only on Your Likes - you basically have a wall of all you 'liked'.   You can show all, or filter photos, videos and certain interests. And if you have about hundreds or thousands of likes already, you can Stumble your own Likes through a sticky button just below your profile photo. Cool huh!

The 'Discover' Page gives you more specific and drilled-down interests.

The newest feature is the "Channels".  On your Profile page, there's a link on the left sidebar and on the lowermost of the right sidebar. Channels are equivalent to 'Brand Pages' - these are streams made by brands, businesses or celebrities.

Only after few minutes of exploring the new design, it feels like I will be staying longer on the site, and will be visiting more often - and not just be contented stumbling via my browser toolbar. Congrats SU! I like it. You win at usability. You champ at user-experience!