With YouTube’s recently redesigned website, it’s like walking into a brand new department store that’s bright, spacious, and nicely laid out.

The new YouTube site exhibits many of the best practices we at Tendo preach to our clients about website design. Most importantly, it’s clean and well organized. Gone is the clutter that overwhelmed the old site design. The use of mouseovers to reveal additional actions is a great device for taming clutter.

The most often used user tasks are easy to find. Also, the site presents users with options (for example, viewing the next video) at the appropriate times and doesn’t distract them with unnecessary information or actions.

Providing users with a clean design and simple navigation will keep them engaged so they spend more time on your website. I’m going to go watch the much-talked-about videos of my friend’s dog now that I’ve found them.

Well, sure enough, the venerable New York Times eventually switched to color photography. And  if you’ve read the Wall Street Journal lately, you know it’s hardly the text-centric newspaper it once was.

One thing USA Today realized, even before the rise of the Internet, is that we humans have become increasingly visual creatures. Nowadays, with screens and information pervading every nook and cranny we inhabit, figuring out how to organize and present that information is more important than ever.

As a result, those big infographics have become increasingly popular.  In Information Design Workbook, author Kim Baer nicely summarizes the reasons why. “With all this information flying at us, we’re craving some guidance to help us sort through it. Hence the preponderance of blogs, news aggregators, content-specific RSS feeds, and an even greater need for information graphics and charts to help visually distill information. Editorial direction and thoughtful design can help us sort through and decide what’s most meaningful for us.”

In helping clients develop more effective communications, we’re leaning on infographics more and more. They’re particularly useful on the Web, when you have a limited chance to engage your reader. And visuals can go a long way if you need to communicate complex information, or a lot of it. Apparently USA Today knew something the rest of the newspaper industry didn’t.

I’m working on a mini case study about an infographic Tendo helped produce with a partner, so look for that follow-up post soon. In the meantime, I’ve listed some good resources below if you want to learn more about information graphics, or if you’re looking for inspiration.

Cool Infographics

40 Useful and Creative Infographics

Edward Tufte

FlowingData

Flickr

Information Design Workbook

I suppose that if voting methods can’t be uniformly implemented—electronic voting versus paper ballots, versus paper ballots in wacky shapes like butterflies—then voting stickers are just as susceptible to similar independence. Still, it’d be easier to take if my once-proud emblem wasn’t so clearly the runt of Tendo’s litter.  Heck, everyone else walked in with “I Voted” in three languages.

“Your sticker sucks,” said Chris, in a rare moment of subtle tact.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here about marketing, it’s that design does matter. My sad little oval with the rudimentary and hardly-to-scale corner image of a flag doesn’t even match up to San Francisco’s tri-language sticker, which employs only a tiny star as its lone design element. Head down the Peninsula to San Mateo County and you’ll find a full presidential seal, complete with “I Voted” in the requisite three languages, plus the signifier that it’s a presidential election. It’s also the only sticker to identify where it’s from.

Unless there’s a clearinghouse of generic voting stickers doing gangbuster business somewhere, the San Mateo offering couldn’t have cost much more to produce. And it goes a long way toward showing that effort and execution do matter in one’s final product. Perhaps this is a lesson to learn in campaigning, as well. —Jason Turbow, managing editor

BRAVO

The website follows the same sense of visual simplicity as the company’s products. The home page ensures that the featured product takes center stage with lots of white space, limited copy, and large images. Apple displays restraint by focusing most of the home page’s attention on one product at a time, usually its latest release.

The site places a heavy emphasis on visual design, blending colorful imagery with bold headlines and copy to create balanced compositions on each page. It’s a pleasant departure from the usual column format with pictures in boxes.

The copy is short, decisive, and punchy (if a tad smug at times) and does a good job of tapping that emotional response to Apple’s products that makes its fan base so loyal. And just like all of Apple’s branding, it’s carried out consistently across the site, from the copy to the look and feel.

Because Apple has fewer products to sell (as compared to Dell or HP, which sell hundreds of products to a variety of market segments), the site is easily divided into six segments: the store, three product categories (Mac, iPod/iTunes, and iPhone), downloads, and support.

TRY AGAIN

While the site offers seemingly rich and varied product info, including video and galleries of dramatic product photography, most of it offers more style than substance. Many links on the site, such as the “iPod Your Life” link, lead to pages that are little more than additional branding experiences, yet provide no additional value.

Top-level navigation, such as locating your desired product or service segment, is easy. But cross navigation, i.e. moving from one segment to another without using the top navigation, is unclear, if it exists at all. Beware the hapless user looking for clear links to iPod support in the iPod product segment.

Apple offers a ton of self-help product support on its site, but finding the specific info you need can be extremely difficult. Basic problems are easy enough to locate and solve with the support content, but it ends there. Need to find information on problems that are more complicated? The answers are usually buried deep within the discussion forums.

We have to throw some props to Apple for supporting and maintaining such a robust online community of users, but navigating the vast discussion boards is like entering a labyrinth. Cross–navigation to other discussion boards isn’t possible, and if you do find some useful information, you’d better copy and paste it into another document because you may never find it again. While the moderators do a decent job of responding to posts (and providing links to other posts or other areas of the site that may answer questions), the discussion boards mainly work because of the persistence and helpful nature of other Apple users who have encountered—then solved—a multitude of problems.

Overall, Apple’s site is a branding powerhouse that is presented beautifully and consistently. It stands apart from other consumer electronics e-commerce sites. But also true to Apple’s tendency, a little more polishing beneath the surface would make for a user experience that matches its sleek design.

BRAVO

Hallmark.com is primarily geared toward consumers, specifically the Oprah-watching crowd, and they appeal to this group with holiday-themed gifts, reasonable prices, and lifestyle content courtesy of Hallmark Magazine. But they talk to their business customers, too—they have a small section devoted to business sales and potential franchise owners. And in true Hallmark fashion, they cover all their bases with the holidays, even promoting non-Hallmark holidays like St. Patrick’s Day (hey, Mother’s Day had to start somewhere).

The general organization of Hallmark.com is good, with a clean design and a number of useful tools on the site, including a birthday calendar to help you remember important dates, and even the opportunity to have someone else personalize, address, and mail your cards for you. The frazzled moms who frequent the site can use Hallmark as their personal assistant and PDA rolled into one.

Finally, the company wears its “good corporate citizen” banner in the form of a heavily promoted microsite that explores their partnership with (Product) Red, which helps people with AIDS in Africa.

TRY AGAIN

While the top navigation of the site is logical—divided by broad categories like shopping online, searching for a Hallmark store, and the Hallmark Magazine—the left nav seems like a jumble of topics without much order. Holidays and occasions are mixed in with sections like “need it today” and “memory making.” The subcategories, which let users shop by occasion, recipient, and so on, offer a more intuitive shopping experience and a better organizational structure.

I support a company that knows its audience and goes after it, and clearly this site is targeting middle-aged women, but it almost goes too niche. The Hallmark Magazine, for example, gets a lot of real estate, but with departments like “renew,” “nest,” “connect,” and “nourish,” it has no hope of broadening its appeal to younger women or urban women. The Hallmark channel is worse—when we last checked, it featured star bios on Shirley Jones and Patty Duke, to name a few. Is Angela Lansbury next?

Any company that allows its brand to get this staid—are you in the market for a pastel-colored children’s croquet set?—is taking a big risk.