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Portland's iPhone application
- 6 Feb 2010
- Robby Russell says... Check out this link
2 comments Last comment by Jude
City of Portland Citizen Reports
The City of Portland has released a free iPhone application that allows people to report problems with any of the city infrastructures. This means that if you’re walking down the street and notice a pot hole, graffiti, knocked over trees, street signs, etc… you can stop, take a photo, and report it right there.
Look forward to hearing how well this works out for the city. Would be interested in knowing if they’ll be opening up the data collected as well.
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After taking a short break over the holiday season, we’re planning to start recording new episodes of the Planet Argon Podcast.
If you have any topics ideas, please let us know.
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Cultured Code, the team behind one of my favorite desktop/iphone applications, Things, has an excellent status page with a flight theme design for their customers.
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Clever rebranding of this South African airline. More photos →
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Conversion Rate Optimisation Case Study
While I generally enjoy the articles on Web Design from Scratch, I found a problem in this article about a/b testing. Take the following excerpt…
“We will look at the test results over the coming weeks to see if our prediction is correct, and use these results to formulate possible follow-on tests to further increase conversion rate.”’
“Results of the test will be posted here once we can see a clear winner.”
The author then invites the audience to check out the new design, which immediately left me wondering if this might skew the results.
“In the meantime, check out Rankmill.com, and start sharing your own Top Lists.”
It’s my prediction that Rankmill.com will see an increase in traffic from people that might not be their typical audience. This new wave of visitors will be coming through via this article, RSS feeds, twitter posts, and other referring sites. Once they get to the site, I predict that they’ll either…
a) See the old design and reload the page to see if the new design shows up. When it doesn’t, they’ll leave the site (increased bounce rates with the old design)
b) See the new design and experiment with the new UI for a bitIf my prediction is correct, might an upswing in new traffic (from people who know about the test) result in conclusions that the new design is more effective? I worry that the experiment is now contaminated and would be skeptical of any results that didn’t properly account for this.
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Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.
from Hocus Pocus -
In advertising we will look at what the person we see in an ad is looking at. If they are looking out at us we will simply look back at them and not really anywhere else.
from You look where they lookOne wonders how well this works on the web when selling products and/or services.
What did Carlos make you look at?
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This is a long post ~2k words and is intended for anyone who is involved with designing webapps and or is interested about how badly they are designed for normal people. In this case it’s about Twitter which is unique in that there are some conceptual barriers that people must first grasp before they are able to properly make use of the service.
from Experiment: Twitter UsabilityIt's easy to take things for granted. As web geeks, we find web applications to be much more intuitive than they really are. Experiments like this are extremely humbling. We can do better as an industry.
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The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.
from Future ShockMost of us use software as a tool to reach goals that exist outside the software. Good design makes the experience of using the software disappear and allows the person using it to focus on the "real work."
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We’ve been using Google Voice for our main phone lines for the past few months with great success. We’re excited about getting to use it on the iPhone (without hacking the firmware).
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We’re quickly getting the new studio organized. You’ll have to visit us sometime.
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Experiment: Twitter Usability
It’s always fascinating to watch people try to interact with tools for that time, especially those that we take use on a regular basis.
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Apple Courts Publishers, While Kindle Adds Apps
As a Kindle owner (and raving fan), I’m curious what Amazon’s strategy is with this move. I purchased the Kindle for what it does well, which is allow me to read books. Hopefully they’ll not dilute the experience of picking up the kindle, turning it on, seeing my recently viewed books, and start reading.
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This discussion between Carlos and I took place on Campfire last week. As you can see, our internet connection is now much faster.
One of gripes with our old building was that we only had a few DSL options to choose from. Our internet at work was always sluggish. When we found our new place we were pleased to find out that we could switch over to Comcast Business as an internet provider. We were also able to move our phone lines to them, which means we’ve consolidated three bills into one… and the best part? We’re saving $50/month now.
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Pardon our dust… but we’ve been in the process of moving to a new studio in downtown Portland. After four years in our last building, we thought it was time to upgrade our digs. We now have a full kitchen, bath, and a nice view of a park across the street. Here are a few photos from our first days in the new space.
Be sure to follow us on twitter or subscribe to our blog feed as we’ll be announcing a studio warming party in the near future!
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EightShapes Unify
We’ve been using this framework for Adobe InDesign to package up our strategy-related client deliverables.
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Planet Argon Podcast
We recently started a new podcast that covers various topics related to the projects that they work on. We invite you to check it out.
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We recently had to take our puzzle apart. We’ll miss you!
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Back in 2004, we started to add pins for each unique location where a customer was from. We stopped updating this board in 2005 and it had been hiding in a closet. We recently repurposed the cork board for something new but made sure we got a photo first. Perhaps you were one of our pins. :-)
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We’re in the middle of an exciting change and we’ve had to take over the ping-pong table.
