When working on online communities, it’s deceptively easy to get lost in the numbers and statistics. You’re keeping track of conversion rates, signups, all kinds of activity measures, retention rates and maybe a net promotor score or satisfaction rating. While all these statistics are certainly valuable, they’re still ‘just’ numbers, and what you really should …
Category Archives: design
Tips for a great creative portfolio
Whether you’re an artist, visual designer, photographer or another creative professional, if you’re taking yourself and your clients/audience seriously you absolutely need to have a place to show some of your work online. It helps inform the people who care about you and your work, and with a good online portfolio you can share your …
Visualization
I just discovered visualcomplexity, a catalogue of over 600 visualizations. There are a couple of really great finds. The best visualizations reveal the underlying structure of the data but without sacrificing the complexity and show artistic beauty and elegance. Other catalogues are mentioned at the coding horror weblog. It seems the developments in visualizations have …
Quick sketch: from textual pointer to arrow
I really like Phatch. It’s an elegant piece of software for batch processing images (its name is a contraction from photo + batch). Open source, in active development and quick to learn and friendly to use for tasks such as making thumbnails for a directory of photos, or adding round corners and drop shadows. And …
Directions: previous, next, back, forward
A simple navigation structure in a wordpress weblog, typically found at the bottom of the landing page: Why is this intuitive? Reading direction in English (and Dutch, and many other languages) is from left to right. When reading we are trained at starting in the top left corner, then moving to the right and downwards. …
Apples, oranges and other fruit
How many items can a category contain before it grows too big and should be split? Long lists are overwhelming and confusing. But it can be very easy to get lost in hierarchies with subcategories, several layers deep. In 1956 George Miller wrote The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our …
Usability: do not forget the experts
In the domain of usability, much attention is given to user satisfaction, intuitive design, ease of use and so on. This certainly has its merits and results in easier to use user interfaces, more satisfied users and in the end more sales revenues. A problem with this approach, though, is that it is biased towards …
A case of affordance
Earlier this week I went to an ATM to deposit a check. The procedure on the new Green Machines is pretty straight-forward. Select ‘deposit’, enter the amounts, choose account to deposit to, put your deposit items (checks or cash) in envelopes and feed those envelopes to the machine.In this procedure I found two minor problems, …