Rachel's blog

In my experience with strategizing and managing online communities, the goal of getting users to register proves much easier to obtain than getting people to come back to the site and participate. I think a slick site design and promising benefits can easily pull a user in to register because there is no commitment for them to get involved. So how do we get registered users to participate in online communities without forcing a commitment? I don’t think there is a magic formula.

If you are a techie, you pretty much know that Mozilla Firefox has pwnd Microsoft Internet Explorer for quite awhile despite the fact that IE has a greater user market share (70+% vs. 18%). Although IE is the primary choice for most users, many users in the tech world believe Firefox dominates by offering the most customization and features and will continue to do so, even with the news of the upcoming IE8 version. Although Firefox has had tons of success with these particular users, it was inevitable that a competitor would come onto the scene. Unfortunately, that competitor is Google, with the recent release of Chrome, their incredibly hyped new browser.

I often send documents to co-workers or clients in Microsoft Word format so that they may edit them. The pesky red underlines for supposed mis-spelled words and grammatical errors has bugged me for awhile. Well, I finally Googled it, and found out how to temporarily remove the red:

Everyone has heard of the prophetic predictions of Nostradamus (e.g., fall of the twin towers), and maybe of even ancients making prophecies as it relates to technology. Although these prophecies are intriguing, a topic more interesting to me is the flipside, technology being able to predict the future.

I signed up for Ping.fm today. It allows you to set your status or create a blog and send it to multiple social networking sites such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several others, all at once. I've found it useful since I just started using Plurk and continue to use Twitter. You can sign up today by using the code "tastyping".

Recently, one of our clients asked us to design a website layout specifically for the iPhone. LevelTen has created one iPhone specific web application in our past, but we have little experience with best practices. This prompted me to research some iPhone web applications and find out what makes a good web app vs. a bad web app. These are my findings:

(The web apps I list below can be viewed on an iPhone, if you have one, but may also be viewed on this iPhone emulator on the web.)

1. Simplicity is Key

In the past couple of weeks I have been reading an O'Reilly book called Designing Interfaces, by Jenifer Tidwell. She makes some good points about what users want in an interface, and I'd like to share a few of them here with commentary of my own.

1. Instant Gratification
   

The most interesting and entertaining lecture I went to at SXSW Interactive was titled, "Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs" The lecturer, Jared Spool, started out talking about how he has attended several magic conventions recently. So how do magic and web design relate? I will talk about three magic tricks that Jared demonstrated that can be brought to the realm of design.

Act I: The Role of Mental Models

At LevelTen Design, one of the things we focus on when developing websites is usability. Usability on websites encompasses everything from creating usable navigation to making sure the website is accessible for the blind. Although we focus on several aspects of usability, one aspect of usability that has been ignored has been color blindness. The reality is that 8% of men and 0.5% of women have some form of color blindness.

At LevelTen, Project Coordinators wear a multitude of hats. The role is never exclusively defined because it bleeds into several areas. Because it is a mixture of so many aspects of the web business, it is important to follow best practices to make things a little less hectic. Whether discussing deadlines with clients or typing meeting notes, there are several items Project Coordinators should keep in mind when doing their job.