Style Switching
1 Jul. 2008
Smashing mag just wrapped up a contest with a nice article on style switching. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately as an interesting solution to dealing with sites that contain a massive amount of data. In particular, it seems to me that the problem with such sites is twofold - the most obvious is that you must cram a lot of info into a small space, but the second is that the user must also be especially engaged to wrap their head around such quantities, regardless of the badassness of the design. So I've been thinking about the possibility of style switching as a solution to this.
In the Smashing mag contest, most of the switchers changed the background of the site they were placed on. But I'm thinking, what about completely changing the layout of the site altogether? In this way, users could choose not just a color scheme that they find pleasing, but an actual structure that is logical and intuitive. Since each user will find something slightly different to be intuitive, the possibilities are endless. Even more so if you allow users to upload their own skin (a bit like the good ol' CSS Zen Garden, but done so that the user's choice of stylesheet sticks with them throughout the entire site) or choose from an entire library of uploaded skins. Skins could even be shared across similar types of site, so, for example, if there was a consortium of libraries involved, they could coordinate their markup and share the skin library so that researchers could get data laid out in the same way from site to site.