Our Value Pricing deck from last week’s NXNE Interactive panel.
Last week we had the pleasure of joining Sam Ladner, Jon Lax and our moderator Simon Conlin on a NXNE panel discussion about value pricing. Abolish The Hourly was a well attended session and, from on stage, appeared to be capture the audience. I suppose any time you challenge the status quo, people take notice. But this topic is really nothing new, though it may be somewhat foreign to the creative services industry.
Website surveys, round 2, when to ask for my opinion.
Previously, I wrote about website surveys and the right and wrong way to display such requests on your website. What I didn’t talk about was when to ask someone for their opinion, which is equally as important as how you ask for it.
Oh, Snow Leopard, you’re so pretty but so broken.
Apple promised a refined, optimized, and elegant release with Snow Leopard. And in many respects they delivered. Here’s what they missed.
UI exploration: Improving date and time entry.
While we’re plugging away on the next update to the Events Calendar, I thought it would be fun to walk through the process we took while designing the new time entry elements used when adding or editing an event in the calendar.
Website surveys, helpful or hindrance?
It seems a lot of companies are interested in hearing what people have to say about their websites. I get that. We have a Feedback button to the left for just that reason. Whether it’s to give constructive criticism, point out a feature we should have on our blog or the Toronto Events Calendar, letting us know if something’s not working as you’d expect it to, or even to congratulate us for doing a good job. These are all great reasons to solicit feedback and I can say we really appreciate people taking the time to contact us with whatever’s on their mind.
Working towards a better experience.
No matter what type of system you’re building, be it a website, web app or desktop app, user testing is a vital tool that will allow you to identify problems in your system and help you build a better experience for your users.
It’s not necessarily a costly and time consuming endeavor. In fact, a few friends and some food may be all you need to get some great insight on how to improve your system.
Here are some introductory tips to help you get started towards building a better experience for your users with the help of user testing. Note that I’m using the term ‘website’ to describe a project or system, but this process can be applied to any activity that requires user interaction.
b5media ad sales slide deck.
We’ve previously talked about the b5media Ad Sales Brochure. What we want to share now is the companion slide deck. We have a lot of fun building slide decks because we’re focused solely on supporting the speaker. This means we want to create a healthy backdrop for them to shine against and help guide the conversation that they’ll be engaging in with their listeners.
We’ve all seen slide decks where you’ve got an abundance of illegible bullet points or tiny little charts. None of this helps the audience or the speaker relate their story effectively. It generally distracts from the conversation with the speaker pointing to things that no one can read and the audience focusing on the slide instead of the story. Engagement fail.
The More You Know, The Better Your Work at flyosity.com.
Mike Rundle has posted a great article on the value of knowing your medium. The article is focused on user experience design for the web, but it applies to all mediums.
In addition to the examples that Mike provides in his article, I’d like to add that a designer who creates printed material knows the constraints of their medium. Print designers need to take into account the size of their canvas - is it a billboard or business card? They need to know technical limitations of the printer - is the process digital or press? Are my images at a sufficient resolution? The list goes on. You can’t effectively design for any medium without an understanding of how it works.
Mike’s article is in response to an article by Lukas Mathis which argues that designers who code (or at least know how to code) can negatively impact the design process. It’s worth a read, though I personally disagree with his theory.
I’d argue that because Lukas is both designer and coder he’s able to identify the issues that arise from being multi disciplinary. He’s not, however, taking into account the issues that arise from knowing too little about your target medium, which presents a host of other issues.
T-shirt deli. Lean juicy pork at log.scifihifi.com.
MacHeist commentary aside, I love the attention to detail at The T-shirt Deli in Chicago. More photos from SciFiHiFi.
