So it seems the iPhone being a whole 4 years sense it showed it’s face first, is now old enough to have a history of the iPhone infographic. I will admit it’s not that great to look at but it is inspiring and mind boggling when you look at how things have progressed.

Infographic Artist Matt Kursmark

In my hunt around the web for something interesting I found an awesome designer. I don’t know this person at all but I thought they had some great work. Well the above infographic is interesting it’s not that easy on the eyes, the below is much more elegant. And if you goes to his website there is a lot that is nice and easy on the eyes.

Transportation via Bicycle

This is an older one but a goodie. This is more of your class infographic, lots of data, good looking and very interesting.

Meet my back up:

Pro athletes, epically in the Olympics, listen to music to get ready for that big race, throw, lift, game… ect. And I figure if it works for paid athletes then it should work for me. I have three key types of ‘musical moods’ that help me out when I am feeling the lag ‘slash’ I don’t want to work feeling.

The Zone Out »

These are tunes I listen to when I want to listen to music but really I need noise to help me fade away in to brain land. It keeps me from snapping back into the real world. I listen to ambient tunes and music without much in the way of lyrics. M83, Imogen Heap, the garden state sound track group, explosions in the sky.

The Motivators »
Indie Rock, Rock Rock, Hip-hop and Ratatat (rock and hip-hop are broad genres well Ratatat is a group just to be clear).Honestly listen to drugs by Ratata it’s amazing. Motivators are songs I listen to often late at night when I need to keep going and I can blast away without anyone calling me… because you are all asleep :)

Vinyle Anything »

Sometimes feeling cool, keeps me cool. If I come in to work early and my eyes are half open coffee kicks my brain… but vinyl. Vinyl kicks my soul. I can throw on something new in the old formate like Fleet Foxes, or Death Cab for Cutie or Ben Harper maybe and things just start to seem… warmer up.

My advance know your musical moods, and use them wisely :)

UX being ‘user experience’, and in the context of the web we mean understanding what the users of your website are doing. Do you know what your users are they looking at, what interest them on the page, and what are they ignoring on your website, or are you guessing?

These tool well help you stop guessing and will enable you to communicate better with users, creating more awareness, more inquires and more sales.

Clicktale

This is an amazing tool that allows you to get all kind of data about how people are using your site. The thing that really sticks out about this program is in addition to aggregate data, goal tracking, heat maps, you can also watch videos of your users mouse movement!

That’s right, well people are surfing your website there is some fancy javascript running in the background tracking the mouse movement and clicks of site users. What’s great is about half of the people that use a computer scan the mouse in the same location that they scan their eyes. This sort of tool can be very revealing and give you great insight to how a user moves through your website.

Website: http://www.clicktale.com/
The cost: free – $999

I have used this in the past and it does an amazing job at tracking users and making it easy to access deep actionable data. Be warned it may take a little time to set up and some time to go through reports, watch videos and tag actions. ClickTale is clear and easy to use, there is just a lot to see.

CrazyEgg

This tool is dead simple. I did a post on it a not to long ago, and this is an item I recommend for anyone. There is not a whole lot to it , but is what’s great about it.

You can see where people are clicking, via heat maps and dot maps. If you have a website and you want to see how people use a sales page or a homepage. More then just knowing what people click the most the visual display of data allows you to see patterns very easily.

Using this tool on a clients website, I found people were reading through a clients sales page and clicking a small ‘more details’ link down the page. The client didn’t think many people would use this link so there was not much effort put in to the following detail page, however CrazyEgg showed very clearly that half the people visiting this page clicked this link, putting up a flag that either we were missing a key piece of information or we needed to spend some more time on the following page allowing a clear path back to signup.

This tool is simple and visual allowing you to see user patterns

Website: https://www.crazyegg.com/
Cost: $9 – $99
but if your a mac member and want a trial run I have an account.

Don’t Guess!

Is having good clean design that makes a website understandable important?
Is having a solid business strategy very important?

Yes, of course these are very leading questions, but now we need to make sure our design and strategy are working the way we think they are. If strategy and design are important then we need to make sure these elements are working for us. These tools allow you to stop guessing and start tracking and measuring your site. Allowing you to make your users experience with your site better.

The first step to increasing conversion rate is understanding your users, not guessing.

Good luck and let me know of tools you use.

**Of course there is Google analytic, I recommend these tools in combination with Google analytic.

In case you do not know what CSS is here is quick review. CSS is a coding that web designers use to visually style websites. Adding styles like font color, size and font, width and widths of items on the page.

To show the import role that css plays in the current world of web design here is a screen of this page with and with out CSS.

Now something new has emerge, CSS3

CSS3 is the latest version of css and it allows for some very cool styling features. Now I could list off 10 ten new features or do a step by step how-to with CSS. Instead i’ll just show you something that is amazing.

The CSS Monster!

It’s pure css, no graphics at all. Click on the photo below to link to code version.

If you like this, you can see how it was done at Un blob CSS.
And if you would like a how-to CSS3 or CSS tutorial just ask.

Now maybe no one would notice, but all those small details mean the difference between a “B grade” website and an “A grade website”. The thing I am finding tho is the closer you get to being  100% done with a website the long and hard things seem to be. I would go so far as to say that the first 89% of a project is about equal to the last 11% of project in terms of effort or time.

This kind of art takes time, organization and dedication.

Kevin Cornell one of my new favorite illustrators has a website that is great example of what that extra 11% looks like. THE WEBSITE (you will also find Kevin’s work all over AlistApart.com)

This is the screen I landed on after making a PayPal purchase from Kevin’s store.

This type of customer care and detail in web design is inspiring to me. The thank you screen has a custom illustration and humor, even tho I have already bought a product. This kind of foresight and effort is noticed.

What makes Kevin’s  site is it’s attention to detail, which is something that take a lot of time, and to me means that someone cared a lot about there work, and about there customers. So kudos to that extra 11%.

**Look for Kevin’s art on the walls of the MAC soon.

Sites Sighted :
Kevin Cornells the Illustrator »
A list Apart.com »

He used 300 million tweets in real time to map mood in a kind of heat map fashion.
Well I am not sure what this means its interesting to look at.

There does seem to be more and more of these large data aggregation and I am skeptic of how much I should read into it. Check out the video and a few other posts below.

» Article on New Scientist

» Article on Fast Company Blog

» Alan Mislove

One lucky non-profit got $250,000, 4 won $100,000 and 195 runner ups got 20,000, that’s a lot of dough.
See the top 250 here »

This was exciting for me to see my web working hard in the real work and making a difference in real lives, they had 70,000 blood donation over last summer and we will see what happens by the end of this summer! Just wanted to share some success and a great story about social media and the web.

Music Saves Lives website »

Ok so Nike+ is an amazing little bit of technology that I have been using. No, it’s not that new, but there website is! Basically it’s a tool to track your runs, one part in or on your shoes and the other a watch you strap on a add on for your iPod/iPhone. I use the watch which has a removable USB port.

I love user experience

I went for a run a few days ago and I ran the fastest mile I have yet to run using nike+. I plugged in my usb watch, it loaded the workout, pulled up the website but before showing me my run data a video pops up, a famous run tells me “I know fast when I see it, congratulation on your fastest mile yet” the screen closes, and well its kind of cheese its kind of awesome to. The site is easy to use and it feels… fun and fast.

A Little History

Last year I ran a marathon (hardest thing I’ve ever done) and a half marathon, much nicer : ). During this time I was running with my iPhone and tracking with GPS, running 16 miles well holding and iPhone is not so great. Nike+ is small and well it’s not GPS the benefit is when its cloudy nike+ still works, and its very light.

Design is what makes the product

I’ll just say that the nike+ site has “top shelf” design and interface, take a look.

Anyways I am not a fast running, but I love it so if any one wants to go on a jog let me know. Currently using this new website to train for a 10K!

the quote read

“My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned to myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the claims that shackle the spirit.”
– Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

After musing on this for a bit and finding it rings true in much art. I.E. painting is amazing because it’s confined to paint, so when people make painting look real or surreal it’s amazing they do it, because they are in the box of painting.

Then I came upon this awesome article. It’s a short story about a 15 year old  kid who created an iPhone app which Apple ( you know the huge billion dollar profit company… maybe you’ve heard of them or maybe you live on an island)… sorry so Apple thought this app was just simple flash light app, which in all fairness it seemed to be. In reality it was an internet tethering app that allowed users to by pass AT&T’s change of $20/mo and use an iPhone as a modem making this function free! Read full story here.

Every day the limits of technology and nature try to hold us back but through imagination and creativity we keep figuring out ways to work within the limits to do things we didn’t think were possible, to do things that seemed out side the box when in fact they were not.

What have you done lately that’s amazing the box your in?

It’s a robot that changes shape so you can see what a shirt will look like on you…

Or it’s crazy! I mean come on if you are going to stay at home to try on shirts over the internet chances are you are not wearing a shirt and you don’t leave the house enough to need a shirt.

However, someone did have and idea and a vision and was able to take it from idea to fruition and that’s pretty awesome.

Check out the full story »