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Thanks for these design hints. Right now, I'm fairly certain frassle won't appeal to the average AOL/Compuserve/Walmart user. As an alpha-stage application, its expected audience is the blog-loving early adopter. This person is likely to have a nice computer and a fast internet connection. That doesn't mean we should ignore the needs of such users, but at this point in frassle's development I think it is more important to make the basics of the interface usable. It's crucial we get the user experience right, because the powerful features of this system won't do anyone (but me) any good if there's no way to figure out how to use them. This is a challenge though, because frassle is premised on some ideas for which there isn't much user interface history.

So, if anyone has any interface ideas, I would love to see mockups, page flow diagrams, prototypes, etc. My personal preference is to start with pencil sketches in a notebook of a sequence of pages, then move onto the screen.

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Wow! Great stuff, Dave!

I really like sketch D. It instantly reminds me of a product called BaseCamp, which is one of the best web applications out there—powerful, useful, and elegant in design. I don't understand the category column at left; why does "everything" and "international" show at left with a marker and the other stuff at right?

Like your previous design, I totally dig the icons. Especially the fish for the aggregator. I think there is a little too much empty space up top. I like the color scheme better, though I think it could be more interesting. I'm confused by the intersection of four corners in the masthead—where the red-background blog title meets the frassle title and page builder and blog editing controls. This 4-way intersection grabs my attention but doesn't teach me anything.

Perhaps we could see it with the red background dripping down to the blog editing actions, since they are logically associated with the blog, and perhaps some space between the your weblog – aggregator – page builder buttons and the red part?

Design C preserves some of the aspects of frassle's current layout that I like, but has no way to get to frassle's most important functional areas (your weblog, aggregator, site builder). It's hard to imagine how it would look with actual weblog text at the right, so for now I can see in it only incremental improvements to the current design.

Thanks so much for these sketches. We need to talk further about design, especially considering the upcoming split between frassle-the-reading-and-writing-application and frassle-the-backend-for-a-website-you-design. By the way, that is nearly done and alpha 6 will roll out any day now. Only a few changes to the aggregator and note posting/editing page remain. In addition to the new functionality of the page builder, I believe the user experience will be improved dramatically.