JanRain was launching jyte.com as a community game bent on building consensus or stirring controversy around simple claims or statements of fact. ZURB designed and coded the front end of jyte.com, including this example at the heart of the service, the Claim page.
This is the Claim interface ZURB inherited when we began the project. A lot of the core functionality was present, but the page lacked hierarchy and focus. The act of voting and the results of community voting were too hidden.
Note: The hand gun just happened to be an attached image file on this post.
Very quickly consensus emerged around a simple, blog-like layout with a strong Claim heading, big up/down vote calls to action, and a tug-of-war visual treatment to the community's voting. The final interface did not deviate much from this core early concept.
The jyte.com visual style was being co-designed as the finishing touches were put on the interface. Here two functional palettes dueled for attention—green for position, red/blue for negative.
The 'tug-of-war' and 'taking sides' elements were tweaked and experimented with to find a good balance.
The voting mechanism was pulled up into the content block to be nearer the Claim and stay above the page fold. The Claim content was expanded on to include a clear heading, descriptive area, tagging and secondary actions.
The 'taking sides' area was improved to include an extremely simple measure of system-wide user credibility, namely the purple dots of different scales that accompany the user's who have voted. This was the best way to get across a user's credibility on the subject at hand in a quick, bulleted list form.
In the final iterations a site-wide color palette was settled upon that pit 'yay' votes as kelly green and 'nay' votes as a magenta red. The voting button widget was finalized visually and then ZURB developed the JavaScript to make it work.
The interface saw the drastic simplification of the 'tug-of-war' bar—matching the new button style—and relocation of Claim actions like the Embed tag and Email to a space below the voting. Both design moves reduced clutter around the page's core content and actions.
See the real deal in action at jyte.com.