Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia

Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia

This is a neat collection of memorabilia from the Hard Rock Cafe collection. I think that it's neat that it's online like this. However, I am completely underwhelmed with the "Zoom" navigation.

Don't get me wrong, the navigation is smooth and the picture quality is great. The download time on the image wasn't bad, but this is missing the mark. This is little more than a fancy image map. For Silverlight to promote this as some kind of design advantage over Flash is really quite wrong. I've seen this same thing done in Flash before.

Raskin talking about a zooming interface quite a bit and wrote about it extensively in his book, The Humane Interface. If this is what we are shooting for, this example misses the mark. The zoom interface is more than just zooming in on a picture. The zoom interface is more like zooming in on layers. If they really wanted to do something interesting here, they would have had the information accessible on the actual picture instead of on a sidebar.

We often hear about worlds within worlds and this is what the zooming interface would do for navigation. So, unless you are going to take me in that direction, don't talk to me about Zoom navigation.

Dan