What do you use to organise your thoughts? MindMapping and MindManager allow you to do some pretty nifty stuff on a PC but there are lots of great tools and resources available. Bootstrapper has a list of 100 tools, resources, blogs, articles and everything else you might need to mind map like a pro.
Jon
OKA Direct, the last site I produced whilst at TEQUILA\ London, just got reviewed in the NMA this week. It scored a pretty healthy 88% overall. Congratulations to all the team still at TEQUILA\ as well as those moved on to different strokes.
OKA was actually three sites produced at once, RAPT direct and Cath Collins (although CC appears to be down at the moment for some reason) being the other two, all based on a common architecture.
NMA particularly liked the idea of being able to buy a whole room at once, rather than selecting items individually. Good - that was my idea :)
Well done OKA and TEQUILA\
Howard
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Blogged with Flock
Tags: nma, oka, ecommerce, web site, rapt, cath collins, tequila
In a project born out of boredom an american student, Ethan Garner created CraigStatsSF, a site that visualises Craiglist San Francisco rental listings. He writes:
"As I started looking for places, I noticed everything that used to be for rent was now for sale due to the same foreclosure effect that happened to my landlord.
It also appeared that the rents were going up..... but... were they really? Or am I just paranoid and bitter?
Since I was waiting to get my research published, I figured I could waste ample amounts of time coding perl scripts and learning google maps."
This heatmap visualisation is really useful for property rental and property sales information. At a glance the user gets a great overview of all of the available data.
Jonathan
Twitter is taking us all by storm no doubt, but is it just me, or is it's one of the more complicated simple interfaces we've seen yet?
It just has too many potential inputs. I've got it on my phone via text/sms, on IM via Google Talk, and on my Mac via Twitterrific.
I know I don't HAVE to have all of those, but I do, and it's starting to get a touch complicated.
On top of that, how hard is it to use their search tool to find friends/contacts? They really need to sort that out - the interface is terrible!
Howard
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Continue reading "Does twitter have too many entry points?" »
Probably the web celebrity for the day (sorry Mike), Kevin Rose was truly rock and roll (in a not at all as extreme as Motley Crue kind of way) in as much as he slept in late, turned up a bit scruffy and was drinking wine during his talk.
Taking us through the pros and cons of digg, i have to say he didn't really, for me at least, go into much detail about what digg could turn into in the future. I was personally hoping for a little bit of comment about how digg might actually be a new form of internet based communication rather than a site in it's own right, but that wasn't really covered. we saw some graphs which were a little hard to make out.
ok - so i've actually not got a lot to say about Kevin's presentation, but ho hum. maybe i should delete this post :)
actually - one thing I heard at the conference about digg was interesting. I happened to overhear a couple of blokes say to each other "do you actually use digg?" "no" replied the other, adding, "no fucker does outside the US".
i don't use it much I have to say - maybe they were right!
Howard
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What design approach do you use, or does your agency use.
The dominant approach is User Centred Design, but there is also:
Activity-Centred Design
Systems Design
Genius Design - you count on your very own design genius to get it right.
I would be grateful if you could find a minute to fill out this super quick survey below:
Click here to take survey
Many thanks!
I will post the results here in January.
This Flick User Model Diagram is one of my favourite things. It is a little complex but just packed with so much info. There are 3 versions of this diagram created by Bryce Glass - here is the first version and here is Bryce's blog.
Jon
Google have launched a new tool which aims to help them improve their search listings when it comes to images.
The Google Image Labeller is a web based game, or sorts, which allows an individual user to partner up with another person on the site and suggest keywords, or labels, for images which appear to them on screen at random.
The idea is that your keywords help google identify what the image contains and thus improve the accuracy of their search results. Keywords are only added to an image if both of the users match the same word, to make sure you're not doing something stupid and logging the wrong keywords.
I gave this a go just now and it's actually strangely compelling, and I found myself entering words at a speed of knots to see if I could match my online partners. Unfortunately my partners didn't seem quite so fast and I hardly matched any words, except for when an image was really obvious, such as one which showed a footballer.
This is really interesting to me, having previously worked at an image library, as keywording was one of the things we always found hard to do and get right - in fact in the image library world it really is quite a big topic as hard as that might actually be believed. There are firms that specialise in nothing else but keywording images.
Opening them up to the users of the site is a really interesting thing, and I am sure the big players in the library world like Corbis and Getty could take a good look at this method for their own libraries.
Howard
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Semapedia is a great new project that is linking virtual world wikipedia articles to real world physical locations.
By using the cameras that are in most mobile phones nowadays users can scan in a barcode sticker, which will be posted on physical objects, and in turn, download information about that place straight to your phone's browser.
Exciting stuff! So far the technology is only working on Nokia handsets, so I couldn't actually test it on my Sony, but readers for most other phone platforms are on the way via the Kaywa Reader software, and their web site allows you to register your email address so they can tell you when version 1.1 is out.
By bringing social networks and collaborative user generated content into the physical world this begins to bridge the gap that can seem so wide at times.
See, social tagging does have a real-world use!
Howard
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