Madison Ave. Collective » North Krimsly

Five Second Test

North Krimsly — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:07:51 +0000

The Five Second Test is a simple trick to see if people are picking out the important things on your website. I’ve used this low-tech approach to get useful feedback on how effective pages are.

It goes like this: give someone five seconds to look at a page, then ask them what they remember about it. If they aren’t remembering the things you want, perhaps it would be helpful to change some of the visuals to make important items stand out. Sometimes less is more and reducing clutter can help too.

The other day I discovered a more high tech approach at FiveSecondTest. There you can upload a design and share with friends and colleagues to have them do your test. You can also let random users take your test as well.

Whether you use the low tech or high tech approach, the five second test can be a useful tool in your bag of tricks for creating an effective website. What are some other approaches you use to measure the effectiveness of individual pages on your site?

New website!

North Krimsly — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:40:51 +0000

After much anticipation (at least by me!), I’ve released my re-designed portfolio site at www.highintegritydesign.com. I built it using the ExpressionEngine content management system, which has a steep learning curve but is incredibly powerful and flexible. I was able to do everything I needed without writing a single line of PHP code.

Please feel free to check out the site and let me know what you think. Everything should work except for the Search feature which I’m still working on…

-North

Shopping cart demos at Corvallis e-tailing meetings

North Krimsly — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:06:56 +0000

Greetings all,

I’m curious to learn more about eCommerce solutions local companies are using, so I worked with volunteers to put together shopping cart demos for the Corvallis E-Tailing group. Here are the demo dates, in case you are interested in attending:

Feb 17th
Kevin Miller, WordPress with Shopp
North Krimsly, FoxyCart

March 17th
Jason Prothero, Magento
Ben Potter, X-Cart

April (regular date is April 21st but may be changed to accommodate a guest speaker)
Larkin Holavarri, CFWebstore

The meetings are held at the Corvallis Benton Chamber Coalition, 420 NW Second Street, Corvallis, OR 97330, 541-757-1505.

Get your tints & shades

North Krimsly — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:24:46 +0000

Greetings everyone,

As a designer, I find myself frequently needing to generate tints and shades from a color scheme. I didn't see an online tool for this and I wanted to get better at JavaScript/JQuery, so I wrote my own. I'd be delighted if you had five minutes to look at it and tell me:

1) is it useful, 2) does it work well for you, 3) any suggestions.

The tool is at http://www.highintegritydesign.com/tools/tinter-shader.

Enjoy!

Thanks —North