We love to play ping pong. We don’t compete with each other. We just get up and head to the table. We’ll volley for a bit, talk about the project we’re working, and go back to our desk feeling refreshed.
Ping Pong
13 Feb 2010
Is less self-defeating?
11 Feb 2010
So what concerns me is if this quest for creating simple software is hurting us. Are we creating a culture of users that require a dumbed down experience, at the expense of the increased efficiencies and productivity gains we can realize with more complex tools? Are we also stifling the creativity of the designers and developers who are afraid to provide useful features because of the fear that they may be complex or not immediately obvious?
Becoming an obsession
10 Feb 2010
Over the past several years, Gary has been introducing our team to football (soccer to us Yanks). We’ve been making it a regular thing to sneak over to the local Irish pub for lunchtime matches. On a personal level, I’ve become obsessed with watching Liverpool matches at 4:30am PST on Saturday mornings so that I can catch 12:30pm GMT matches.
Earlier today, our new friend and client Matthew Speakman from Spacewalk Creative joined us for a match. He admitted to having recently grown his own obsession with the sport.
Chalk
10 Feb 2010
Taken a few years ago after we went hiking as a team.
Argon
8 Feb 2010
From an exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry
Portland's iPhone application
6 Feb 2010
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.
Suggest your podcast topic ideas
6 Feb 2010
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.
Screenshot: Development Status
5 Feb 2010
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.
Flying 101
5 Feb 2010
Clever rebranding of this South African airline. More photos →
How to skew your A/B test
5 Feb 2010
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 bit
If 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.