henrikharsbo.dk

Low Quality Rocks

I recently got the Hipstamatic camera app for iPhone, thinking it would be fun to play around with. This happens quite a lot. I download an app and try it a few times, it fails to rock my world and subsequently is forgotten about on the very last home screen on the phone. But this is not the case with Hipstamatic. I am actually now using this app more for photos than the native camera on the phone.

What is it that the app does, you might ask. Well, it actually degrades the quality of your photo to make it appear as if it was taken with one of those plastic toy cameras from long before photography went digital. It might sound kind of stupid but the app is smarter than that. The degradation of the image quality is done so cleverly that it actually lends the photo an authenticity that is bigger than life.

You know what they say: low-res is the new high-fi! 

Man Forgot That He Owns Facebook

Who owns Facebook? Well, according to NYC wood-pellet entrepreneur Paul Ceglia, he is the rightful owner. Only he had forgot about it until recently.

As described by Techcrunch, the claim is pretty silly.

A Bunch Of Features But No Soul

I think that most people working with web design have tried being caught in the organizational trap called design-by-committee. I certainly have! Design-by-committee is a horrible process where stakeholders sort of get to take a vote on which features should be included in the final site.

Over at Smashing Magazine they have a great post on why design-by-committee must die. I especially love this quote by Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch:

 "There’s a saying I love: “a camel is a horse designed by committee.” A variation is “a Volvo is a Porsche designed by committee.” Some of the best product advice I’ve ever heard goes something like “damn what the users want, charge towards your dream.” All of these statements are, of course, saying the same thing. When there are too many cooks in the kitchen all you get is a mess. And when too many people have product input, you’ve got lots of features but no soul." 

 

Pay With A Tweet

Well, I guess it was just a matter of time before someone introduced this concept.

There is something that you want to buy and your payment consists of a tweet marketing the product. It all happens at paywithatweet.com where they have indeed discovered that the value of people talking about a product is sometimes higher than the money they would pay for it.

Danish blogger Emme describes having bought a book by tweeting about it and had a rather negative experience because the site forced a specific tweet text on her. She had to go with a prefab marketing statement, that in now way reflected how she would normally tweet about things like this. Also she had to give the app access to her Twitter account. This could all be be undone from her Twitter account settings once the purchase was carried out, though. 

To me it seems like the guys behind this have a good idea. It just seems in need of a bit of ironing out.

Supreme Notes

Check out these awsome notes by Rachel Smith. 

She has made them on her iPad using Sketchbook Pro from Autodesk. 

Compared to this my own notes look like a gathering of sick pen strokes.

I have downloaded Sketchbook some time ago. But nothing I've made comes close to this. It's all about talent baby ;-)

Tip of the hat to Boetter.

Looking at Customer Flow - Cohort Analysis

Last week I attended UX London. It served as a nice big splash of inspiration for my professional life.

One of the speakers Joshua Porter talked about Metrics Driven Design and introduced the concept of Cohort Analysis - an interesting way of looking at your online customers.  

Cohort Analysis is a method where you measure how many of your customers actually stay with you over time. In this sense you are really looking at the effectiveness of your design. 

For instance if you look at all the customers who sign up in February you keep focusing on this customer group to measure drop off over time. This can be done for each month and serve as a significant tool for online businesses when it comes to understanding customer flow in relation to design improvements 

Banal as it may sound I am sure that it is something that is actually not practiced in all the businesses where it ought to be.

In general Porter and the rest of the presenters did a fantastic job at the conference, and I will most definitely write more about all the inputs I got there in the days to come. 

Stay tuned.

Chrome To Drop http://

Chrome is by far my preferred browser these days. I have practically stopped using other browsers unless my job requires me to do so.  

I have many reasons for preferring Chrome. The main one being, that Chrome simply seems to be faster loading and more responsive than any others browser out there.

Today Mashable reports that the Chrome developers are about to remove the annoying "hhtp.//" from the URL-field in the browser:

When you see some text prefixed by “Http://”, you automatically assume that what follows is a web address, as defined by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The question is, since most web addresses are easily recognizable anyway, do you really need it? The developers of Google Chrome don’t think you do, so they simply chose to hide it in a developer version of Chrome.

It would appear that the solution is a bit tricky to carry out in real life. But I like the sentiment behind it: Namely that web browsing should be as user friendly an activity as possible. No geeks required for that ;-)

Get the full story at Mashable

Marketing In the Age Of Attention Deficit

Welcome to communication overload in hyper mode. 

Today with the amount of information flowing our way our obvious choice is to simply disregard the ordinary. 

In this talk from TED, my favourite marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones :-)

5 Ways Facebook Has Harmed Dating

Over at Mashable they take a look at how Facebook has changed the way we date. The point being that it hasn't been changed to the better.

Take a look: http://mashable.com/2010/04/10/facebook-dating/ 

@ Acquired By MOMA

Huh...? Museum Of Modern Art has acquired @ as a symbol. 

http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/03/22/at-moma/