TVARK is an online TV museum for television at the boundaries – idents, title sequences and more. Many pages have been authorised by TV companies, whose staff are among the most avid visitors – particularly presenters whose ephemeral work is preserved. At the site's twentieth anniversary I was brought modernise the design for varying screens and to improve user experience. The role expanded to running the site and moving its hundreds of thousands of media assets into a modern content management system. Our small, remote team is distributed from San Francisco to Cyprus.
TVARK is a good example of my work in Adaptive Design, which constructively delivers functionally different products if need be, in varying spaces.
The site has a thumbnail image decorating its video descriptions but that makes no sense in a handheld screen where space is at a premium. Conversely, the gallery of video stills below the description on phones would sprout repetition if, on wider screens, the thumbnail decoration was also found there.
My solution was to omit the thumb image visually from wide screens while preserving it in the carousel of the gallery lightbox. Additionally, clicking the decorative thumbnail image opens the lightbox at the point of the hidden image in the unedited stills gallery.
This is also an example of mobile-first thinking. Ideas arise more naturally when adding new features to an expanding UI instead of shutting off in situ UI for a contracting design – that style of working can also invisibly weigh down the agility of small-screen experiences.
Interaction design: 'peeled' stickers for interactive elements and a 'flat' one for report UI. Demonstrated: sharing demo for email and links. Facebook and Twitter tools follow those services' APIs, as illustrated on my client projects host, t42.xyz.
User research profiles
