Wednesday 22 February 2012

A More Desirable Stadium

We made the buttons on the screen look so good, you'll want to lick them. - Steve Jobs on Mac OS X's Aqua UI

There is a much-loved, widely-used (online and at conferences and the like) diagram called the User Experience  Honeycomb. It looks a bit like this:

User Experience Honeycomb

It was first drawn up by Peter Morville in 1994 in an attempt to illustrate the facets of user experience - and why it is important for product development teams (that's us!) to move beyond usability.

Throughout the course of its lifetime, Stadium has grown and improved in all of these aspects except one: desirability. Here, desirability refers to the image, branding and emotional design of Stadium. During Stadium user research, including usability testing and interviews, one of the most commonly voiced sentiments was that Stadium's applications looked outdated and, well, a bit less than desirable.

We decided that it was time for a change. We wanted to make Stadium applications, if not lickable, then at least attractive. We also wanted a solution that would not add to our implementers' workload. Their area of expertise is the design and implementation of business solutions. They should not be burdened with graphic design considerations. Therefore we decided that we would create complete, packaged themes that could be used as is.

The first themes we have implemented were determined by considering our biggest clients' branding and colour palettes.

And so, without further ado, here are a few glimpses of the four new themes for your perusal and hopefully, your enjoyment. We would love to hear from you, so please drop a comment and tell us what you think!

Default theme filter and grid
Forest theme filter and grid
Charcoal theme filter and grid
Burgundy theme filter and grid




Tuesday 14 February 2012

Stadium 4.0 Beta is ready!

Finally the day has come! Stadium 4.0 Beta(4.1.2047.4570)  is available for download. Stadium 4.0 Beta has the following:
  • A complete redesign of the user interface
We have focussed on improving the aesthetics of Stadium for this major release. This is simply because we believe 'attractive things work better'
and this latest redesign will go a long way in improving the user experience.
  • Upgrade to .Net framework 4.0
We have also upgraded from .Net framework 3.5 to framework 4.0 to take advantage of  the latest technological advances provided by Microsoft.

The focus of this release has been on the end user and has been quite an experience for the development and user experience teams. We have been focussed on this for past two months and it has been a huge team effort, a big thanks guys. Well done!

I am encouraging all Stadium users to download it and take it for a test drive. We are still at early stages so your feedback is needed! 

There will further posts regarding the design changes soon from our awesome user experience team.