October 2011
3 posts
Non-Interaction Events! Wait... What? →
Hey event tracking friends, we are really excited to announce a new feature to the Analytics event tracking landscape: non-interaction events. “But wait!” you ask, “How can an event—which measures…
Remember the "$300 million button"? →
The results were always pretty fantastic, and the backstory takes a little of the mystique away. Was it really that simple?
Then, you look around and realize how many sites are following the exact same paths. This was a big site, probably one visited with some frequency by their customers, yet not often enough that they knew which account they might have registered with.
We learned a...
Metamemory and the User Experience | UX Magazine →
Texting to see how this comes up on tumbler. If its good, this might be my new blog.
when we expect to be able to access information in the future, we tend to have reduced memory for the actual information, but enhanced memory for where to find the information. Thus, while we do measurably worse
July 2011
1 post
Macrophotography →
Shared by nathanziarek
Fantastic photography. Some are easier to guess than others.
This is a macro photo of…what do you think this is? Click through to find out and see more macro…
September 2010
5 posts
102-Year-Old Lens on a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR →
Dreamlike results.
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Maybe Google Instant isn't as Fast as I Think →
I’d trust Search Engine Land to have the right data, but I’m surprised that the “formulating query” stage of searching is so quick. Still, Google says that half a second leads to 30% increase in searches, so 2 seconds could be quite the boost.
I fall right in line with SEL’s thoughts on how this will affect incoming terms. They might shift to shorter terms, but...
A Failure of Ethics in Journalism →
Crazy Apple Rumors: Just as reporters in the 1930s helped cover up Roosevelt’s illness and in the 1960′s helped cover up Kennedy’s philandering, we in the Apple press community help cover up the…
UIEtips: How to Create a UX Design Library →
I got it wrong. It was the other day when I was talking with EightShapes’ Nathan Curtis while recording an upcoming podcast.
As we were talking, I had suggested that a UX Design Library was a…
Google Instant Proves Me Wrong
A few months back I wrote a bit about Minimalist Google, and how the Big G was sacrificing “load” speed (the amount of time it takes the browser to download and render a page) to decrease Focus and Query time (or increase perceived speed).
I have no reliable way to test, but I’d guess this new page loads and renders slower than it’s less-fancy ancestor. If microseconds count — a...
August 2010
1 post
Segment Your Funnels Through The API →
Say your website has a check out lead generation process and you want to understand funnel abandonment by new vs. return visitors. You can do this through the Web Interface using many segments,…
July 2010
1 post
An Event Apart: Web 2.1 The Medium Comes of Age →
Shared by nathanziarek
It’s amazing how far we’ve come.
In his opening keynote at An Event Apart in Minneapolis, MN Jeffrey Zeldman provided a historic perspective on the development of the…
June 2010
2 posts
HTML5 vs. Newton →
Grant Hutchinson: This series of screenshots shows Apple’s questionably named HTML5 and web standards showcase pages displayed on a Newton MessagePad 2100.
I love it.
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Mobile First Helps with Big Issues →
During part of our conversation on the Big Web Show yesterday, Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Benjamin, and I discussed some of the ways designing for mobile first can help mitigate some of the thorny…
April 2010
3 posts
BallP bowling ball 'bot puts your sense of balance... →
We’ve seen robots play Soccer, Tennis, and Battle Ball, and now Dr. Masaaki Kumagai, director of Tohoku Gakuin University’s Robot Development Engineering Laboratory, brings us…
Transmit 4.0 →
Been beta testing this for a while. It’s very nice. My favorite feature: With the new Transmit Disk feature, you can now mount any of your favorites in the Finder itself, even if Transmit’s not…
Google Expands Rich Snippet Support... →
Nearly a year ago, Google announced that they had begun extracting metadata from microformat and RDFa markup on pages to display “rich snippets” in search results. They recently expanded this support…
March 2010
5 posts
2 tags
Milwaukee Applying to Google Fiber for Communities →
Yay Milwaukee! I doubt we’ll get it — there have to be thousands of applicants, and I don’t know what would make MKE special — but I love that we’re putting our name out there based at least somewhat on constituent feedback.
The editor must have thought the article was too short, and decided to plop the PR implications for Google in there. Those two quotes read...
2 tags
Hierarchical Facebook Design Circa 2006 →
I’m not sure I’m in 100% agreement on the design for mass-audiences, but I love hierarchical interfaces, and think I really would have dug something like this.
1 tag
Closeness of Actions and Objects in GUI Design →
Nielson’s claim (“things that are close together on the screen are seen as related”) shouldn’t shock anyone, but I think this article is more about designing for actual content, not just best-case.
I can think of any number of times I’ve produced really strong wireframes only to see them fall apart in the design stage because the text was shorter or longer and...
4 tags
Is My Web Analytic Software Even Working?
A recent question on the Google Analytics forums had me thinking about how I test various web tracking solutions.
It seems as if these types of questions fall into two camps:
Recent installs verifying the code is correct and
Number hawks verifying the accuracy of the numbers.
Number hawks
The latter group is in for a surprise: there is no way to be confident in the numbers. Web traffic is...
Valerie Sichi-Krygsman Illuminating examples of... →
Valerie Sichi-Krygsman Illuminating examples of the power & challenges of govt-civilian knowledge sharing & collaboration in disaster relief http://ow.ly/1f0pL
February 2010
10 posts
Linksys router turned into smartphone-controlled... →
Working for a large company comes with a lot of baggage, the least of which is an RFID security badge. For those small companies who can’t afford such extravagantly wireless door key…
Experience Maps →
An interesting depiction of user experience has surfaced the other week over at the nForm blog in the form of an experience map. Gene and his team has come up with a way to represent…
Flash, Google, VP8, and the Future of Internet... →
Jason Garrett-Glaser, currently lead developer of x264, on the state of Internet video. Thoughtful, detailed, insightful analysis.
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Makers of Frames →
Shared by Merlin Mann
“People tolerate the unexplained, but not the inexplicable.”
Look around you. There’s a field surrounded by trees, a curb along a street, a raised subway platform, a sign-in…
Sorry, English major, the engineers have triumphed →
In 2008, Nicholas Carr took to the pages of The Atlantic to make the provocative case that Google might be “making us stupid.” His basic worry was that a reliance on the Web was…
Microsoft RickRolls WiFi Network Leechers →
An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft has revealed that it RickRolled users that were killing its TechEd conference WiFi network last year by torrenting large files. Network administrators at the…
TiVo granted patent on recording Season Pass... →
It’s been a ten year process, but TiVo just won a patent on managing DVR recording schedules and resolving schedule conflicts using a list of shows ordered by priority. US Patent #7,665,11…
We’re the Stupid Ones: Facebook, Google, and Our... →
Photo by michiel Normally I try to chew on an idea for a post for a few days; it lets me sort out my thoughts and form some kind of thesis. I’m totally not doing this here, though, so…
December 2009
3 posts
2 tags
Why Wise Leaders Don't Know Too Much →
The worst thing my wife can do (especially when hungry) is give me 25 restaurants to choose from. I simply don’t have the capacity to judge, store and weigh that many options with any sort of relevancy. I’ll try to research menus and quickly become overwhelmed by appetizers and drink specials. I know more than before, but my decision became much, much harder.
Jeff Stibel with...
Annotations! →
It’s a good thing I never got too far on my annotations software… Google has (will?) release an update to Google Analytics that allows you to mark the timeline with notes. This will help tremendously when trying to identify odd spikes and lulls in the data. Plus, these annotations can live with your account or publicly for all who have access to that account.
Hopefully the API will...
2 tags
Minimalist Google (now with hideaway menus!)
UX Magazine has an interesting note on the changes Google has made to their main search page.
Essentially, they’ve turned back the clock — showing only their logo, text box and a couple of buttons — until you move the mouse, and the now-standard options and links fade in (hover your mouse below to see it in action).
function showImage() {...
November 2009
4 posts
3 tags
Three Years Later, Feedburner Finds a Home @...
Feedburner has always been an outcast in the Google Universe. The purchase was fueled by the incredible growth of RSS and monetization opportunities of a digital subscription medium, but the obvious touch point — Google Analytics — never materialized.
The AdSense team (do they run Google Analytics as well?) recently announced that these two tools will get a little closer and...
October 2009
13 posts
2 tags
Parti →
the chief organizing thought or decision behind an Architect’s design presented in the form of a basic diagram and / or a simple statement [Wikipedia]
Doesn’t it sound like something you could bust out at a meeting and have everyone agreeing without ever understanding what you said? This word’s got power.
Special thanks to UX superstar Luke Wroblewski for finding and...
1 tag
Setting Goals with Google Analytics →
Justin Cutroni of EpikOne has a nice review of the new goals (time on site and pages per visit) available with version 4 of Google Analytics.
What’s interesting here is that you can create a time based goal if a visit does NOT reach a certain amount of time…I like to think of ‘Less Than’ goals as ‘Failure’ metrics.
For example, when you configure a failure goal you can easily...
1 tag
Google Ups the Ante with Analytics Enhancements
I doubt I’ll ever understand how Google is able to justify continued development on this excellent tool, but I know enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth. (Actually, as a bit of a city boy, I really don’t know not to do that, but hope I’ll remember the adage should the situation ever present itself).
This most recent set of enhancements touch features across the board,...
“I don’t care what kind of blender we buy, so long as it fries eggs well.”
2 tags
Diffusion of Responsibility →
VKI Studios in their continuing series on Persuasive Web Design:
We’ve all heard of cases where someone’s lying sick on the sidewalk, and hundreds of people just walk by without offering help. What’s going on here? And how can this possibly apply to web design?
What’s going on is “Diffusion of Responsibility”.
PET is a pretty amazing way to think...
Persuasive Web Design: The PET Methodology →
Nice, quick introduction to what PET means and what it has in store for #UX
Luke Wroblewski and Jared Spool talk web form... →