Links

Lisa Welchman describes Web Phrenology as the science of understanding an organization’s strengths and weaknesses by examining their Web presence. This brief ebook clarifies how organizational dysfunction can affect your company’s web site.

This site shows screenshots from applications that require you to enter data in a specific format without any dashes or spaces. Classic.

“According to a survey by Real Simple, the living is surprisingly easy in these urban areas.
Takeout on every corner. Easy access to a doctor. Timed traffic lights. These conveniences can ease even the most chaotic days.”

Portland ranks #2 in the country!

We’re planning to have a small party next month on April 1st, 2010. If you’re in the Portland, Oregon area, be sure to RSVP on our site.

We swear… this isn’t an April Fool’s joke! ;-)

We just published a new entry to our podcast. In this episode we discuss our recent UX Designer hiring process. Enjoy!

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.

Grab the app

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.

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.

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.

We’ve been using this framework for Adobe InDesign to package up our strategy-related client deliverables.