the StyleSwitcher
UI Design is often viewed simply as a coat of paint. That view is easy, accessible - and kinda superficial. There's "more than one way to skin a site"
The overwhelming response to the StyleSwitcher feature is "It's fun". That's good - Don't underestimate the value of entertainment.
But wait ... There's more!
Serious Fun
A UI feature like the StyleSwitcher is essentially experiential candy: It sweetens the process.
Hopefully, StyleSwitcher encourages exploration and facilitates "directed browsing" by my target audience of recruiters and potential clients. Sure, it's fun... But it's also Serious Fun.
Practical commercial applications for the meta-information tagging technique employed in StyleSwitcher are potentially huge. The "content integration through context management" technique is a first step towards presentation-level implementation of The Semantic Web.
Ultimately, StyleSwitcher has less to do with Graphics than it does with Information Architecture.
A "you-centric" attribute of UI is that the individual end-user/site visitor should be comfortable with their environment.
- "Empowerment" (Lordy, I hate that word). Nonetheless, it has value. ... At the simplest level this is superficial "skinning" of a site: The ability to choose color and layout that appeal to you.
- As does "Entertainment". Hey, it's fun.
Similar agenda to personalization, but driven "inside out" by site stakeholders.
- Content Management products (s.a. Sharepoint) and Business Intelligence Systems may have a substantial interest in using this technique to make their products more palatable to clients and end-users, as well as more competitive in the marketplace.
Language translation issues will be handled primarily via services that actually alter the content data. But there are also implications for design context in the obvious arena of presentational layout (s.a. "different" fontsize & orientation).
- Of particular interest to me are whether there are also more obvious - or nuanced - cultural preferences re styling, emphasis, color, etc.
An enterprise often wants to
- Aggregate profiled "views" of its world of info for internal Intranet consumers
- Serve appropriately targeted presentations to B2B customers
- Seamlessly re-brand their services as white label or private label products
One of first real souped-up implementations of StyleSwitcher was the Electronic Sales Assistant in 1990. This control panel (built in Hypercard/Supercard) gave you full presentational control over Powerpoint-like marketing templates. The content was automatically updated online.
More recently we provided a whole set of pre-engineered layout templates, themes, and form controls as the customer-side Design UI tools for Information Builders WebFocus.