Victor points to the
Guggenheim.com website as a place where lots of lovely interface work has been put in to delivering a great learning experience – and it *has*.
Audio cued into zoomable pictorial information, novel image-led interfaces to complex online exhibits. It’s certainly cutting-edge.
For a CD-Rom around five years ago.
Don’t get me wrong Victor – it’s a great piece of design and content, and I’m sure achieves the client’s objectives and satisfies the audience.
I just can’t get over the feeling that it’s a CD-Rom delivered over the web.
To be sure, that’s an achievement in itself, and something that we only dreamed-of and evangelised with misty eyes about 5 years ago.
But the way we evangelised about it was by picking up a CD-Rom, showing someone it’s rich, immersive interface. We listened to them saying ‘yeah, so what it’s a CD-Rom, my kids have them… they’re fun i guess for five minutes’
And then we showed them the Web.
The clunky grey-paged, blue-linked web.
We showed them how you could GO. TO. THE. LOURVE. Yeah, THAT louvre. In Paris. Thousands of miles away. Just. Like. THAT.
Look around the whole place. Link from a piece there to an essay on perspective by a professor in San Diego, and link from his citations to the Bauhaus archive in Berlin.
And Leave a message. Or read other peoples messages. Email them. Email the professor.
Connect.
And their eyes shone.
We said – imagine, in 5 years time having the richness of that CD-Rom with the interconnectedness and human contact of what you just experienced on the web.
So what happened?
5 years on, we seem to have B.O.W.s- Browse Only Websites.
Rich experiences like the Guggenheim, or sites by Kioken like ClassicMotown, some pieces of the Smithsonian and more than I can’t think of right know – that undoubtedly are beautiful and enriching, but bury themselves in their own rulespace, creating their own rules and idioms – deigning to use the web and the browser only reluctantly as a delivery mechanism.
Why do we have rich media, innovative interface sites that don’t connect to the web, or it’s communities on one hand.
And on the other – innovative community, hypertextual, make-the-most-of-the-web, but not of interface or rich media sites on the other.
Never the twain shall meet?
Can anyone give me examples of sites that escape these stereotypes? Or have we spent 5 years in a big loop round to the begin where we left off at the end of the CD-Rom era?
Petafloptimism 
i’m not going to comment.
psyche!
I like your vision, Matt, and I share it. So I don’t have some grand argument for the opposite, merely some spurious thoughts to help myself understand why we’re not there, yet.
RE>Why do we have rich media, innovative interface sites that don’t connect to the web
Because we can replace the word ‘sites’ in that sentence with
Companies
Organizations
Systems
People
We have a tendency to stay in our tribes and this keeps us from connecting. The Guggenheim wants to give it’s own particular view of art, apart from the Tate, MOMA, etc. Letting in outside voices contaminates that vision and scares them.
On a more tactical level, Guggenheim.com is a somewhat independent venture from the physical museums and they have an as-yet unrealized business model. They also just launched, give ’em a break! Community takes time to build, even if they’re going there, and they needed to make a splash for the venture capital community (disclaimer: I know folks there).
Hopefully all this will inspire us to reach the next level. We have great community sites with conventional text interfaces, and we have great Browse Only Websites with no community. Let’s combine them and see what kind of experience we get.
start here:
http://habbohotel.com/
I am a sucker for multimedia driven flash websites like the guggenheim and every CommArts awarded site of recent. But i never seem to go to them more than twice or maybe, rarely, three times. WHy? cause they never seem to be updated or if they are they do not appear to be. Even on a super fast CNN.com connection i get the damn loading screen. And I will not even mention all the other complaints that people have about flash including blurry anti aliased body copy. What i can see happening is designers trying to mimic HTML sites in flash with aliased fonts via miniml and practically no animation, see the new impressive http://weather.nike.com/enjoytheweather/main/index.html site, scripts to utilize the browser back button, etc etc. All this reminds me of the synthesizer that sounds like a guitar. Why not just play the guitar?
hi you website is cool dude
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do know anymore sites that are like habbohotel.com because im getting tired of habbohotel because i did everything and now im on cokemusic.com but its under construction so…please let me know if u know about anymore sites like habbohotel
Yeah tri cokemusic.com but its not open all day and u dont have to pay for credtits
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