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It's amazing what happens when great ideas and great design collide. Take thehumanproject.us website, with the ambitious goals of connecting people together to talk about the challenges and opportunities we face as a species, and the good sense to frame their project in a clear, clean, and striking way on their homepage. When we arrived at the site, we were immediately struck by its cleanliness and beauty. And that was even before we started scrolling down! For simplicity's sake, you can check out the experience we are talking about in the 'iframe' of their site below. (You'll note that it doesn't work perfectly in this narrow of a frame so consider going to look at their full webpage in a new window.)
We can't really say that I've ever seen anything online before that compares to the experience we first had scrolling down through those faces. It was so surprising, pleasant, and interesting, that it kept our full attention for quite a long time just scrolling up and down, seeing the way the different faces combined with one another. Even then, we knew that we wanted to read the text which went alongside it because I knew that in some sense, it would be a narrative. Just looking at the pictures as we scrolled down, we knew that there was a story they were going to tell. So we went back to the top and read all the way down through.
How did they keep our attention for so long? Attention being the thing which, if you're interested in marketing, is of key interest to you. For us, it was the way they told their story. First of all, they let you focus on one thing at a time. One piece of text has to leave the page before you can read the next, and so it's literally like turning the page of a book. On top of that, each person that you see onlys says one thing, and each person has something to say. The website, indeed, manages to feel very human, and I think that really makes people comfortable.
Creative lessons learned:
- One thing at a time.
- Tell a great story.
- Make your designs feel human.
