I saw this while I was at the Palace Hotel for the Web 2.0 Summit/Conference thing:
Notice - one faucet, not two. One faucet that poured warm water. Not water that was too hot, not water that was too cold, water that was just right for washing you hands. Great design.
Much to my surprise, yesterday was World Usability Day. I was one of the many attendees at Toronto’s first UsabilityCamp. Umbra, one of the presenters, had some key take home messages that I’m going to share with all of you.
1. Form follows function: the design of your product should be based on the function of your product.
2. Form communicates function: the design should communicate how your product can be used. Example: The shape of an office stapler can communicate how you might use it.
3. Usability is affected by changes in lifestyle, trends, and material costs: Designs should follow lifestyle trends as well as take into account the cost of raw materials.
Okay. I admit that some of the key messages are more appropriate for physical products and less so for web design. However, they can still be useful for web design. As an example, I think point #2 can be translated to adding drop shadows and textures to web buttons. This will communicate more clearly that those buttons can be pressed or clicked upon as they will appear to be more three-dimensional.
It’s that time again. Last month, I posted my picks of five great blog posts that are useful for web designers and web developers. This week I have decided to lighten up the mood and post five fun FreshBooks posts that you may have missed.
Mentos Mad Scientists on Dave Letterman
“If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at the magic reproduction of the Bellagio Fountain they create with 200 litres of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints (3 minutes).”
Working from home is da Bomb
“… 3. Afternoon siestas 4. Traffic commute - no thanks 5. Clothing optional …”
The Bloglines Plumber
“I actually thought this was a really cool way to show that your service is down when I first saw this plumber yesterday on my Bloglines online rss reader system”
Snakes on a Plane for Dummies
“Is it the plot? Somehow I don’t think movies such as “Snakes Slither the Sky Train” , “Snakes in the Plus-15“, and “Snakes Snarl the TTC” will make it into theatres any time soon.”
Our Adventures with Wordpress Comment Spam
“It seems only the really nasty comments get through. We’ve also noticed that we receive the most spam at night or on the weekends when none of us are in to moderate the comments. Tricky little devils.”
As a bonus in our November edition, I’ll throw in my pick for funniest comment.
Episode 6 of FreshBooks “Build Your Business” Fall Teleseminar Series
Introduction to Building Traffic to Your Website (59 minutes, 48 seconds)
Listen using the MP3 player below or download the podcast.
Jennifer Laycock, editor of Search Engine Guide, talked to Michael about how search engines can help attract visitors to your web site. Here are brief notes and timelines of their call:
(0.17) Call agenda: introducing the fundamentals of search engine optimization
(2.40) What has changed the most in search in the last year? Don’t just focus on Google
(5.25) What is the business case for driving traffic to a web site?
(6.44) Definition of organic marketing
(7.26) Results of eye tracking studies show searchers perceive an organic link to be of higher quality than a paid link
(10.08) How conversion rates differ for generic versus brand keyword terms (e.g. tennis shoes vs. Nike)
(10.57) Optimizing your site for organic search levels the playing field between big and small businesses.
(11.30) How many searches a person carries out before making a purchase, and what this means for your search terms.
(13.25) How search engines rank web sites – the Pinocchio effect
(16.41) Why text is so important to search engines
(17.17) Can search engines read the text in Flash?
(18.09) How to structure your web pages (like an essay or newspaper article)
(19.46) Suggestions for how to judiciously incorporate your keywords into a web page.
(21.00) What is a keyword phrase, and how do you rank for your keywords?
(23.35) The steps to follow to find your keyword phrases
(24.46) PPC a great way to test your keywords before optimizing your site
(25.35) Scanning and skimming – what it is and how to structure your content so it can be scanned and skimmed
(27.42) Keyword density – how to know how often to include your keywords
(28.21) Using highlighting or links to call attention to certain keywords
(29.54) Introduction to “offpage” factors: links, domain age
(31.05) About the different types of links (reciprocal, incoming, paid, text or image)
(32.51) Google bombing
(33.32) Why link quality is important
(34.16) Why link age is important
(35.20) The sand box concept, and what the real barrier to entry for new sites is
(37.44) How to get a competitive edge in presenting your product/service
(40.05) What do you do when your chosen keywords don’t do well in keyword effectiveness tools (e.g. WordTracker)?
(43.38) How do search engines look at dynamically generated pages, versus regular HTML pages?
(46.00) Use of site maps – how many links are too many
(46.45) About WordTracker and Keyword Discovery
(48.54) An additional benefit of these tools: identifying future products/services
(49.46) Use your competitors’ web sites to look for variations on your keyword phrases
(50.10) Do you need to submit a site to search engines and directories?
(52.16) Do framesets make a difference in optimising a site?
(53.44) Linking strategies will be talked about in more detail next week
(54.04) The key budgeting guideline: you should always earn more from the effort your SEO professionals put in than what they’re charging you.
(56.43) Jennifer can recommend search engine optimization providers
(57.39) Be patient. It may take a while to see benefits from an organic campaign.
Thanks Jennifer!
Links:
Next week’s teleseminar: Sign up for call two with Jennifer Laycock: Advanced Traffic Building Techniques for Your Website
Just wanted to send a quick note to let folks know something many people have been asking us about, “Will FreshBooks integrate with 37Signals‘ truly excellent project management web app Basecamp?” You bet. And for the record we think Basecamp is awesome too.
So…here’s the deal…a release coming soon will make it incredibly easy to bill your clients using FreshBooks for the work you do in Basecamp. Some might say it will be a painless way to invoice your clients…that’s our thing.
So…hang in there…there are plenty of exciting goodies for you just around the corner for you here at FreshBooks, and we can’t wait to deliver them to you.
To all FreshBooks users, we are releasing Version 3.6 with Credits this coming Monday November 13, 2006.
Please expect a short period of downtime between 6:30 AM and 8:00 AM EST (NOTE: this is 3:30am in LA, 6:30am in NYC, 11:30am in London, 7:30pm in Hong Kong, and 10:30pm in Melbourne).
It’s Friday afternoon and it’s almost time for the weekend. This weekend, don’t forget to take a moment of silence at the 11th hour on the 11th day of this month to remember those who lost their lives so we can enjoy our everyday peace and freedom. It will be Remembrance Day here in Canada as well as in Australia, Colombia, UK and Ireland. Our American friends will know it better as Veterans Day. Have a great weekend.
Seems like an odd combination, Morgan Stanley - one of the world’s top investment banks mentioned with FreshBooks the leader in online invoicing? It makes a little more sense when you put it in the context of the Web 2.0 conference that finished up this week in San Francisco. FreshBooks is in attendance and Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley did a presentation on Wednesday on the state of the internet.
I wasn’t there, but Michael was and he was really impressed with her talk. She is enthusiastic about online video and makes the Google acquisition of YouTube look brilliant. There is a lot of really fascinating stuff in this presentation, so I recommend you look it over if you are interested in where the internet is going. If you just want to see your favourite internet company - FreshBooks - mentioned alongside Basecamp, writely and kiko … skip to page 35 
Have you ever found a text form field just too small on a webpage? Do you blame spell-check for ruining your ability to spell words correctly without one? Third-party software might be the answer.
A few days ago, one of our forum members asked me about increasing the size of the description field.
“When creating consulting invoices for my customers, I like to enter my notes in the Description field of the invoice. This works great and is a nice feature for my customers. However, I was curious if there is a way to make this field a bit larger?”
After reading his forum post, I remembered a cool third-party tool for Firefox that would allow you to resize any textarea form (thanks Wesvt). Check out this screenshot.
If you are as dependent on spell check as I am, you’ll also find Google’s new toolbar very helpful. Check out this screenshot.
This is a great tool for those of you who find yourselves copying and pasting text into Microsoft Word or any other spell-checking capable word processor.
While we typically don’t recommend third party software with FreshBooks, you are welcome to try them out if you are feeling adventurous. However, with all third party applications, please use at your own risk.
If you know any other cool third-party browser tools that might be great to use with FreshBooks add a comment to this post here.
Episode 5 of FreshBooks “Build Your Business” Fall Teleseminar Series
Advanced Web Analytics (1 hour, 15 seconds)
Listen using the MP3 player below or download the podcast.
John Marshall, founder and CEO of ClickTracks, talked to Michael about advanced web site analytic techniques. Here are brief notes and timelines of their call:
(0.25) What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the web analytics field over the last 12 months?
(3.07) Agenda for call: moving beyond the concept of return on investment; internal search; optimizing web site conversion funnels
(4.35) Return on investment: the problem with concentrating on ROI as a metric
(7.48) What ROI cannot measure: the holes in your data
(9.33) Examples of where holes in data could emerge & strategies of how to overcome them
(12.55) Moving beyond ROI: how to measure the degree to which a campaign is successful without using the ROI measurement
(13.57) The metric to use: average time on site
(14.23) Why people don’t like to use average time on site
(15.17) Is shortening the time on site better, because you’re helping people get somewhere faster?
(15.45) Rule one in using the time on site metric: compare numbers across campaigns only within your own site.
(18.42) Internal search – when is it appropriate to use it, and how can it be used?
(19.25) Data mining gives increased visibility into what your customers are looking for
(22.05) About the quality of data you get from internal search
(24.00) Why including internal search on your site is worth it
(28.50) How can I use segmentation and path analysis to determine which visitors are good candidates for popular internal search terms?
(29.17) Clarification of “path analysis” and why this data should be interpreted with caution
(33.56) Where path analysis data does work, and why segmentation is important
(35.34) How to use segmentation to get useful data from exit page data
(38.56) Funnel optimization – how does the notion of segmentation and defining of goals fit into funnel optimization?
(40.05) Background to how funnels and funnel analysis on web sites started out, and why the process inherited some fundamental design flaws
(42.55) An online sales process should not be funnel shaped
(44.19) Another problem with thinking that people visit pages in a predefined path
(46.50) Contact page one of the most important pages that build authenticity and trust
(49.07) What data can be extracted from funnel analysis that is valuable
(51.15) How to define what an influential page is
(52.53) What can a company do when the goal is a page you may not own, so once your user gets to that goal the company cannot track after that point?
(53.39) Choosing a goal for a web site (ecommerce or lead generation)
(55.12) About the 2 methods of data collection - log files and JavaScript
(56.55) What to do if a 3rd party site doesn’t allow you to track your information
Thanks John!
Links:
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