Ok, today i’ve decided to go a bit beyond the Snøhetta exhibition I was talking about a few days ago.
So I decided to head over to http://www.snoarc.no/ to see what else I could learn from them.
So let’s give us some perspective.
“One’s of Snøhetta’s project main characteristics is the emphasis on context and landscape, leading to the harmony between architecture and its surroundings.” from Snøhetta’s exhibition brochure.
Let me put it blunlty: what does that mean from a multimedia perspective, how such a concept simple and effective translate to a digital environment?
We can all agree that being digital is not Snøhetta’s mission, yet, the exhibition used many of those tools to showcase concrete buildings, future projects and even being an architect ourselves through interactive application as explained before.
Therefore I’m wondering how does the Snøhetta’s website fit with it’s environment.
Well, in this case the environment can be anywhere, a cyber café, the laptop or touch screen available at the museum, an office desktop with 21″ flat screen, an eee-pc or an handheld device running on android 
Basically the environment will be the display.
Ok, let’s run down a few bullet points.
The website strikes as being focused on strong visual. The entire display of the screen is taken by a very sleek looking High quality picture related to the content we are browsing.
The good :
- The page adjust itself to the screen resolution and in doing so, we’re not losing on the picture quality. That’s definitely a plus.
- The search: Highly visual, Hints in form of thumbnails
- Classification clear in View All results: We can clearly see in which section the results belong
- Sorting results: In search, Employe profiles, etc… Clever way to adapt to user’s mental models.
- The layout is clear, pretty and gives a sense of quality and details. The screen sized pictures are definitely helping getting into the environment.
The not so good:
- Search issue: Nothing shows when a search terms returns no results. I was really interested in there project for Saudi Arabia new cultural center. I started typing saudi and no results came up. I was pretty sure the project was there somewhere. Tried again with Saudi Arabia, Arabia and nothing. I remembered though that it was name after a king, so by typing king I found it.
What went wrong here: The search engine seems to be based on the title of the content, maybe some keywords, but is definitely not using full text. That would be a nice feature to have. And with the site being full flash, no guess about metadata and their uses.
- Another issue I had with the search is that names are not searchable and no alternative is available.
Why not make names part of the search terms, and also link their mini profiles to the related press release if present. Try a search for Royal (which will not suggest king, but I’ll leave semantic search for another day). You’ll find a press release about Kjetil Trǽdal Thorsen.
But try Kjetil, you’ll find nothing.
Final word: 1 picture worth 1000 words…
or so they say. In that case, Snøhetta’s website has put a very high emphasis on the visual design of the site. And it works, the site is beautiful and give that sense of craftsmanship.
There is a lot of nice features such as the search highlights to jump directly to the desired result. The presentation of information is sometime very intuitive and flexible (sorting by date/subject, with tree of not) which is a bonus to adapt to the user’s habits.
But i found this website to create frustration where it could come up with a pleasurable and usable experience. The search query appears to be to narrow (exact word) and could do a better use of meta data or even just use the full text.
It’d be interesting to see how the website would perform using other tecnhiques (I’m thinking html+css+javascript framework for the motion) or even pushing it further with HTML5, CSS3 and SVG…
