Administrative Debris

Following the cartoon to Erik Burkes ‘Simplicity’ I stumbled upon (sorry, I forgot via what blog) on Ryan Tomaykos article Administrative Debris which in turn was inspired by Edward Tuftes critique of the iPhone.

The idea is that the content is the interface, the information is the interface - not computer administrative debris.

Let that sink in. Content is the interface. Nothing else. When you watch a photo on the iPhone nothing else is visible. The adminstrative debris only shows up when you interact with the picture, otherwise it’s just not there.

Ryan takes that (almost) to the extreme in the redesign of his blog. As an example, here is his sites navigation bar before and after the redesign:

Does this work? Perusing his website (which I hadn’t seen before) it seems like it could work.

I will have to let that sink in for a while and try to incorporate it into my next designs. (Yes, this blog could use a redesign too, but most of my readers already see the “pure information” version anyway - in their RSS readers. So this hasn’t really much priority)

Technorati Tags: design, information