WTF is an IDM? It’s an “Inspiration Design Model” and I get to critique five of them over the next 13 weeks for my “Interactive Media I”:http://class.cas.msu.edu/tc346/ class. The professor assigns a website for us to look at and analyze, we each comment with a blog post and reply to at least one of our peers’.

This week’s IDM is “smallTransport”:http://www.smalltransport.com/

!http://jewlofthelotus.com/files/2006-09-07_smalltransport.jpg (smallTransport quote.)!

…

Well, I’m kind of unsure about this one. I’ve been looking at it for the last week and a half, and I suppose I can conclude that it’s alright. It’s not great, but it’s not bad either. I’ve got a few problems with it…

The layout is too w i d e . Not everyone browsing the net has a 20″ monitor. I’ve got a 12″ PowerBook with a browsing screen no bigger than 800×600. In fact, I only have 1074×768 resolution – I couldn’t squeeze the the whole page on here if I wanted to. Ok, rant ended. All I’m saying is I don’t like to have to scroll horizontally. It’s just not fluid with the rest of the web – sites scroll down, not right.

Now that we’ve established that the page is just too darn wide, let’s look at why. The answer: the ‘Daily Bits’/’Comments’ content areas. Who puts their comment section next to the article?? After reading the article you don’t want to have to scroll all the way back to the top (to read the comments) just to continue scrolling DOWN! If it’s not the easiest, it’s not the best. So here’s the plan:

# Move the comments beneath the article, k?
# Turn the ‘Daily Bits’ into a nifty rotating Javascript feature.
# Move the flicker and Rock & Roll column left, beneath the ‘Daily Bits.’
# Lower the ‘Input and pause’ search box above the ‘Daily Bits.’
# Slide smallTransport logo left, above everything else.
# And cut 300 pixels off the right side.

All problems solved. Here is what I liked:

*Input and pause* – Nice one. The lazy typists dream – you don’t even need to hit Enter to get what you want!! With the pretty little drop-drown box for results, it’s a pretty rad design. However, the “use arrow keys & enter” instructions didn’t work for me, I could mouse over them though.

*The rotating image* – This confused me at first. I came back to the site and saw a new image at the top of the page and was under the impression that a new article had been posted. I quickly discovered your trick, though. It’s cool and all, but maybe it shouldn’t be right up there top-and-center.

So, you can see my likes and dislikes kind of weigh-in even. I guess the ultimate question is: Will I ever return to smallTransit after writing this? No, probably not. I wasn’t too interested in the content (some visuals would have helped). He seems like a cool guy, though. Way to go, dude.