I am working my way through the new book on search site design, Search Patterns by Peter Morville & Jeffery Callender (O’Reilly), so you’ll be hearing some of my thoughts about this. In fact, I am sending the authors this site as an example of just how powerful the “less is more” design principle can be, as well as spot on color choice. Perhaps they will leave a comment.
Update: And he did! (Peter Morville)
I’m a fan of http://theark.org but searching through their calendar to find shows I might like involves a lot of pogosticking and feels too much like work. In contrast, Konsrtr offers a simpler, calmer experience while providing all the necessary information (date, venue, embedded video).
However, I don’t think they’ll thrive unless they add features. I want to search by artist, limit by venue, and share URLs. By adhering to such design principles as progressive disclosure, they should be able to add more without loosing less.
Simply go to konsrtr and see what you think of its exceedingly plain design. You just type in a city and it brings up the upcoming concerts with some images and videos in sequential order. That’s it. It worked as well for Charlottesville, Virginia as it did for Berlin, Germany.
My question is, how can they allow me to search by artist, thereby bringing up a very different type of search results, and still maintain their cool look and feel? I’ll have to use the feedback box to find out who is behind this effort, but they are smart and talented designers whoever they are. Kudos konsrtr! Now about that domain name…(see this post on RWW)
I’m a fan of http://theark.org/ but searching through their calendar to find shows I might like involves a lot of pogosticking and feels too much like work. In contrast, Konsrtr offers a simpler, calmer experience while providing all the necessary information (date, venue, embedded video).
However, I don’t think they’ll thrive unless they add features. I want to search by artist, limit by venue, and share URLs. By adhering to such design principles as progressive disclosure, they should be able to add more without losing less.
Hi,
My name is Johan and I’m the guy behind konsrtr.com and I would like to start out by thanking for your kind words about my little project!
I’ll be changing a lot on this site in a while – for example adding filtering features as you mentioned as well as some other changes regarding readability etc.
Progressive disclosure is absolutely the way to go to keep the minimalistic design, possibly by combining the location search with an artist search giving the user the possibility to choose search scope.
Yeah… that domain name ain’t good at all… I’m looking into changing it to something more intuitive.
Again, thanks for your feedback and please return to the site in the near future for a major upgrade.