This blog suffered from not having an easy way of grouping posts about the same topic. I solved that by build functionality to represent Series’. The blog software did not give me the possibility of giving more focus to extra valuable posts. Collections are my reply to that challenge. Together they make the blog more fun to play with, and more expressive.

For me the basic definition of a blog is a chronological list of posts with the newest entry displayed first.

However, blog posts are not only defined by their publish date. Therefore they can usually be found via categories and tags. Since not all posts are equally valuable – and the newest post is not always more valuable then older ones –  WordPress has for a long time incorporated the concept of “pinning” a single post to make it always appear first in the otherwise chronological list of posts. Recently they have also introduced “featured content” that is a section on the home page with a selected set of posts (still in chronological order).

New concepts

For the redesign of this blog I wanted a more expressive way of grouping posts and a more clear hierarchy of importance among them. I therefore built two concepts: Series and Collection.

A Series is simply a set of posts about one topic, ordered from the first post to the last (not the opposite which is the standard way of ordering posts on blogs). I have written a few such and until this redesign they where only displayed reverse chronologically and found via their tags. Now they are also presented on their own pages: Bathroom User Experiences, 4 ways I meet “users”, Content Types, Deliverables & the shorter Structures of User Experiences.

I use the blog to present myself and my thoughts on interaction design etcetera. To give an overview of myself and the content I am extra proud of I created Collections. They are simply a set of links to posts or series’, sorted in whatever order I feel is appropriate. I chose to present two such inside the chronological flow of latest blog posts on the “start page” of the blog. The collections are presented in a side swiping list which makes them compact and thus easy  to scroll by for my returning readers. The side swiping lists also break the flow in a way that I hope is interesting to visitors.