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Khan Academy Redesign

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Re: Khan Academy Redesign

#11

Post by neovive »

jasonrr wrote: post #9
duopixel wrote: post #6

While the new design is better visually, it follows a trend that I've seen the past few years and that I don't particularly like: it dedicates almost all of the real estate trying to convince you that the Khan Academy is great, while downplaying the videos which are the actual content of the site. This is fine for an app or content that is behind a "registerwall", because you must convince the user that registering i…

Totally fair criticism. Like any design effort, it represents a careful priority balancing act. The Khan Academy is trying to do a lot of things, and communicating that effectively is a challenge. For example, not everyone is as knowledgeable as you are about what the Khan Academy offers and why they should care. The good news is that people don't have any trouble finding the videos, so I don't think the design is ca…

Great job on the redesign. I've been following Khan Academy for a long time and the new design is great leap in usability and the playlist feature is excellent. The old site required a lot of in-browser searching and definitely was not as appealing to younger audiences.

BTW: Sal's TED talk was very inspiring and really demonstrated the amazing potential of his work. It's great to see all of the recognition and support he is receiving and the excellent team now in place. His talk even inspired me to start blogging about Education last month -- see the first post on Education2.org [http://www.education2.org/2011/03/welcome-to-education2-org].

Re: Khan Academy Redesign

#12

Post by te_chris »

barmstrong wrote: post #2

JQuery mobile seems like an awesome way to get both iPhone and Android support in one fell swoop. It's still not quite as good as a native app, but it seems like you're getting 90% of the benefit with about 10% of the work. For a dev team strapped for resources it seems like a good option.

Best thing is, combine it with PhoneGap and you've got a "native" app store submittable app quickly.

Re: Khan Academy Redesign

#13

Post by rubergly »

duopixel wrote: post #6

While the new design is better visually, it follows a trend that I've seen the past few years and that I don't particularly like: it dedicates almost all of the real estate trying to convince you that the Khan Academy is great, while downplaying the videos which are the actual content of the site. This is fine for an app or content that is behind a "registerwall", because you must convince the user that registering i…

One of the complaints I've recently seen pop up consistently regarding Khan Academy is something to the effect of "Why should I trust this one guy? What does he know?" Prominent displays of Bill Gates helps to convince a random visitor of the site that, yes, this is a big deal and is someone you can trust, which is something a visitor otherwise couldn't possibly know until watching and carefully critiquing several videos. The wall of links is definitely important, especially the "wow' factor of the overwhelming number of videos, but without the proper context, that list of videos could look like a content farm, and a visitor might never be convinced to click through several links in order to see how legitimate they are.

Re: Khan Academy Redesign

#14

Post by zitterbewegung »

te_chris wrote: post #12
barmstrong wrote: post #2

JQuery mobile seems like an awesome way to get both iPhone and Android support in one fell swoop. It's still not quite as good as a native app, but it seems like you're getting 90% of the benefit with about 10% of the work. For a dev team strapped for resources it seems like a good option.

Best thing is, combine it with PhoneGap and you've got a "native" app store submittable app quickly.

I have heard the performance of using PhoneGap versus a native android app is quite noticeable. YMMV

Re: Khan Academy Redesign

#15

Post by 6ren »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #14
te_chris wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best thing is, combine it with PhoneGap and you've got a "native" app store submittable app quickly.

I have heard the performance of using PhoneGap versus a native android app is quite noticeable. YMMV

I wonder how much faster phones need to be for it not to matter (i.e. native is still faster, but not noticeably). Would dual core be enough? Assuming the engines can scale behind the scenes for us, how many cores would be needed?

This would change everything, especially for the iPhone's walled gargen (unless new apps appear that require the extra power - perhaps console-quality games? complex visualizations)

Intel managed an amazing trick, of keeping demand for more processing power strong for decades (from 1978 to 1998; when the celeron was introduced, for the market that valued low price over performance; and 2008, the Atom for low power consumption over performance). But to really compete against ARM requires letting go of the blessing and the curse of back-compatibility - which Intel hasn't succeeded at so far (see Itanium). The demand for performance seems to be ending, and I expect with it, Intel will also - perhaps by 2018.

Re: Khan Academy Redesign

#17

Post by Raphael »

I would strongly recommend a black background to go with the blackboard theme of the videos. (Alternatively, switch to whiteboard visuals). It would blend so nicely. Also, the blackboard animation should be in a smooth vector format instead of blurry compressed, bandwidth-intensive videos. Now for words and symbols, I recommend text. You can easily time-release it with JavaScript. For diagrams, maybe something like Graffiti Markup Language. http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/about/

Re: Khan Academy Redesign

#18

Post by krosaen »

fwiw the khan academy runs on app engine and is open source:

https://sites.google.com/a/khanacademy.org/forge/for-develop...

pretty easy to keep up with the progress by running it locally and occasionally syncing.

one note: on my nexus one, the back button in the upper left of the mobile site doesn't work. specifically, after clicking on one of the list items, sliding to the right, I can't go back by hitting the button on the upper left.

Re: Khan Academy Redesign

#19

Post by ryanpetrich »

marcomonteiro wrote: post #5
rubergly wrote: post #3

The design looks very slick, and I'm very impressed. My one complaint is that it seems wrong to have a pseudo-hover state for the entries in the lists. I don't know what standard practice is in mobile web interfaces, but it seems strange that scrolling causes elements to look selected because you have to hit a point in order to start scrolling.

I noticed that too and wondered if it was by design or a bug in the implementation. I haven looked at the source though so can't answer knowledgeably.

It's a side effect of the way iOS implements scrolling--as soon as scrolling starts the web content is "frozen" and only resumes once the scroll is complete. Only way around is to imitate the native scroll using CSS and JavaScript.

Re: Khan Academy Redesign

#20

Post by ryanpetrich »

6ren wrote: post #15
zitterbewegung wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard the performance of using PhoneGap versus a native android app is quite noticeable. YMMV

I wonder how much faster phones need to be for it not to matter (i.e. native is still faster, but not noticeably). Would dual core be enough? Assuming the engines can scale behind the scenes for us, how many cores would be needed? This would change everything, especially for the iPhone's walled gargen (unless new apps appear that require the extra power - perhaps console-quality games? complex visualizations) Intel m…

iOS's JavaScript engine and version of WebKit is single-threaded; dual core won't help (this isn't strictly true, but there's a global lock that they both acquire). No support for WebWorkers either

Perhaps Android is better in this regard?

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