Intefy in Kansas City’s Just for Starters Entrepreneurial Competition Today

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Posted July 15th, 2010 in Products, twitter | 1 Comment

We are so excited about an event going on tonight here in Kansas City at the Kauffman Foundation. “Just for Starters” is a forum for aspiring entrepreneurs to share a business idea with a panel of judges, in a timed presentation. Our own Matt Bartlett will present Intefy amidst some stiff competition. According to the event information:

The finalists were selected by KC Roundtable, a local young-entrepreneur group. Four judges – Grant Burcham (Bank President), Sam Meers (Marketing Expert), Grisel Wiley (Angel Investor), and Mark Allen (Successful Entrepreneur) will critique the finalists and ask them challenging questions. At the end of the night, the audience will decide the winner.

We will be hosting the event live and talking about it throughout the night @freshid and using the #starters hashtag. If you want to attend in person, buy a ticket now, or pay at the door. Registration includes attendance, alcoholic drinks and food and it will be a wonderful time!

Find out if Muslim Ranch can beat out the Pocket Shocker; or how a brand new construction company expects to be successful in this economy. See our Intefy product in action and hear what we have planned for it. Is there a KC entrepreneur who will revolutionize collection practices in the US? You must attend to find out the answers to these exciting questions and more!

Thanks to Diana Kander for inviting us to take part in the competition and allowing us to share the event live with our online friends. We’re crossing our fingers Matt brings home the prize, but even if he doesn’t we’re pleased as peaches to be selected as a finalist, and so proud of Matt we can’t even talk about it without sounding like we’re gushing (or like we’re his Mother.) We are so grateful to have him on our team, and will be cheering for him!

Watch the action live at www.twitterface.com/justforstarters starting at 6:00 pm CST tonight, July 15th.

Kristi :-)

UnGeeked Elite!

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Posted April 30th, 2010 in Products, twitter | 1 Comment

ungeeked logoWe at the Fresh ID office are extremely excited for an event coming up on May 13-15 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  The event is called UnGeeked Elite and is a three day conference that highlights social media, marketing and branding forums.  The event has an excellent line-up of speakers including Olivier Blanchard, Chris Brogan, Scott Stratten, Dan Schawbel and others who are all well-known social media, marketing and branding experts.  In addition to gaining great insights from the experts, your ticket and attendance also gets you free copies of books by Chris Brogan, Sally Hogshead, Scott Stratten and Hubspot.  All of the information about the event and speakers can be found at the official UnGeeked Elite event page.

It will definitely be worth the price of admission (and if you register before May 12, you can get a huge discount)!  The event is being sponsored by SOHObiztube, a great online community that helps businesses manage brand message, value and promise.  Check it out at sohobiztube.com.

ungeekedIf you are like us and can’t make it to Milwaukee but still want to attend the event, you can do so by purchasing a virtual event ticket.  Attending this way will give you access to our custom Twitterface page for the event.  You can check out the page here prior to the event. It will be password-protected for registered attendees only once the event starts.

The entire conference will be streamed using Livestream Pro, and, of course, you can always interact with those physically or virtually attending the conference via Twitter while watching the presentations.  If you purchase a ticket for all 3 days, you’ll save… tickets are available for each individual day for $99, and for the entire conference for $199. You can register for the event and purchase your ticket(s) by visiting the UnGeeked Eventbrite page.

For us, this is another little milestone in the life of the Twitterface product, which we will soon be renaming/rebranding to Intefy, by the way. This is our first virtual paid event, and the first time we will be able to have people tweet from the page using Twitter’s more secure oauth mechanism. We’re very excited, and looking forward to testing this process out with CD Vann and the (truly) Ungeeked Elite!

Never More Excited About Twitter!

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Posted April 17th, 2010 in Products, twitter | 0 Comments

Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter said to Chirp attendees (most of whom are application creators or developers), “3 billion requests a day is what you guys make to our server, that’s just api traffic… Twitter is hard to compare to other services because there’s not been anything like Twitter. There’s no other major service that is as distributed, and is really a network, with so many in-and-out points.”

Ev’s entire talk is below, but I want to explain a bit about why I, Kristi, and all of us really at Fresh ID, are more excited about Twitter than ever before. First of all, there’ve been some grumblings and murmerings because Twitter is starting to do things it feels it must, like buy or partner with mobile phone developers to make official Twitter clients for various, oft-used smartphones (such as iPhone, Droid and Blackberry.) If you watch Ev’s talk you’ll see why they’re doing this – there’s an awesome clip of a real user experience of a woman trying to find a Twitter app in the iPhone App Store. It thrills us, as user experience people, that Twitter’s doing this kind of real-world research.

But the reason why we feel excited, despite learning we are going to have to make product architecture changes as every app must use oauth and not store Twitter account data as of June 2010, is because of the number of announcements and steps they have taken that show REAL caring for the Twitter ecosystem and all of the millions of people that make up our Twitter community of users, developers, stakeholders and their own company employees. Twitter aims to grow to hundreds of millions of users, creating significant opportunities for us all. Ev made it clear throughout the week, that Twitter is not looking to take out third-party apps, but they need to do what they must for new and existing users and and rather than rehash their features or worry about what they’re doing, we as developers and marketers and entreprenuers need to step up and use their tools to innovate, not imitate. And they are in the process of giving us MORE tools than ever. http://dev.twitter.com was launched during the conference and they are just beginning to give us api’s for virtually everything they do, and in some cases with less limits and better results (something called user streams.) They’re doing this for themselves and the third-party apps, to enable greater creativity and more exploration of what we can do with the base architecture.

We set up a Twitterface page at the last minute, and you can still see tons of tweets from people who attended the conference and people with questions. I encourage you to check it out and watch Ev’s talk there, or below. There are some more great links below about the content and news that’s come out of Chirp, so you might want to check those out too.

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If I missed any great coverage, please leave it in the comments. We’re excited our dev Joe got to take part in the event… it’s obvious he’s really energized by being with the other smart, creative people at the conference because he’s full of ideas and energy, which is yet another reason we’re more excited about the work we are doing around Twitter than ever!

Bonus Guest/Coverage/Coolness

Will.i.am, of Black Eyed Peas fame, showed up as an unexpected guest at Chirp. Several things were neat about his appearance: first of all, he did a darling interview in which he used the word “dope” a lot and said he had to get into music so he didn’t end up like “these cats” – as he pointed to the overwhelmingly geeky developer audience. (It was funny!) Then he stayed the rest of the day, sitting and learning with everyone else, and apparently spun tunes and tweeted at an after-party as well. Here’s an interview he did with Scobleizer at the conference:

Fresh ID to Unveil Custom Chip Foose Tractor Live Online

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Posted March 4th, 2010 in Press, Products, Social Marketing | 0 Comments

The reveal will take place at the 2010 Commodity Classic in Anaheim, CA and shown online live at foose4020liveshow.com

Twitterface-foose4020

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI (March 3, 2010) – For the past 3 months, legendary automotive designer Chip Foose has been working with John Deere to produce a customized 1972 John Deere 4020 tractor. Thousands of people have been following the design and build process online through video “webisodes” made available at the http://deere.com/bigbuck website and on You Tube. Interest in the unveiling has reached a fever pitch, leading John Deere to produce the event live online in partnership with social media agency, Fresh ID. Anyone with an internet connection can watch the big reveal online at http://foose4020liveshow.com this Thursday, March 4th at 1:00 p.m. PST/4:00 p.m. EST.

The tractor is part of the unique Big Buck Customized 4020 Tractor Giveaway that customers can enter to win at their local John Deere dealer through June 30, 2010. John Deere chose Chip Foose to completely customize the tractor in a way that has never been done before to highlight sales incentives that run through April 30th 2010. The tractor will be on display at the John Deere booth throughout the 2010 Commodity Classic in Anaheim, California March 4-6 with online replays of the unveiling available at the http://foose4020liveshow.com website.

Following the unveiling, the tractor will tour the country as part of the John Deere Drive Green Tractor Experience where rural property owners, agricultural producers and other interested consumers can take advantage of the opportunity to operate and ask questions about the latest models of utility tractors and other equipment available from John Deere. The tractor, along with three gator utility vehicles, will be given away as part of the promotion. Rules for the giveaway as well as a complete schedule of Drive Green events can be found at http://deere.com/drivegreen.

About:
John Deere (Deere & Company — NYSE: DE) is a world leader in providing advanced products and services for agriculture, forestry, construction, lawn and turf care, landscaping and irrigation. John Deere also provides financial services worldwide and manufactures and markets engines used in heavy equipment. Since it was founded in 1837, the company has extended its heritage of integrity, quality, commitment and innovation around the globe.

Chip Foose is an internationally recognized automotive designer and fabricator best known for his work on custom hot rods. He starred in five seasons of Overhaulin’ on TLC. Foose’s unique style has earned him numerous industry awards, including the Ridler Award and Best of Show at SEMA (Specialty Equipment Market Association), as well as recognition in the Hot Rod Hall of Fame. Foose owns and operates a custom shop in Huntington Beach, California.

Fresh ID, LLC helps businesses around the world expand their business and reach their goals. By understanding companies from the inside out, Fresh ID designs intelligent solutions and products that help clients do business and engage with prospects and customers. Brand identity and monitoring, social media consultation and campaigns, web design, site socialization, interactive design, application development and user experience strategy are a few of the services offered by Fresh ID. More information about the company and the Twitterface application is available athttp://freshid.com and at http://twitterface.com.

Live Nude Events… Behind the Scenes of Like Minds 2010′s Online Event

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Posted February 28th, 2010 in Product Launch, Products, Social Marketing | 5 Comments

We had an interesting Thursday/Friday last week. For those who don’t know, our product Twitterface has come out of beta and is now a paid product. Pricing is still being finalized. We have a new feature that allows video on the page, as you can see by clicking the image, and the Like Minds conference held Friday in Exeter, UK was kind enough to partner with us on our first ever debut of this offering, to show their event live online while it happened in Exeter.

Twitterface-likemindsWhat we learned, was more than we bargained for. Things blew up. We had to make adjustments, there were issues and confusion. And of course, all of it happened in front of everyone watching… talk about exposing yourself! It’s a bit nerve-wracking to do these experiments in the social space where things could go horribly wrong and people may jump all over you about it. But it gave us so much real experience, and mostly worked well, so I am thankful we are offering this now. I wanted to recap what was going on behind the scenes of this fantastic conference and tell you what we’re doing to make these events better in the future.

The Twitterface page for Like Minds had the aim of using an assortment of services, and whenever you combine technologies, mayhem often ensues before you get it totally right. Our goals were:

  • Live Streaming of the Conference
  • Watching Real-Time Conference Conversations
  • Tweeting from the Page
  • Links to Conference Information
  • Delivering Live Blog Feeds
  • Providing an Online Experience that Extended the Live Experience

Live Streaming

Our partner and developer Joe Taylor did an amazing job of coding the video feature for Twitterface pages so that it’s easy for someone to embed a video on the page. It is super-easy to use the embed code from Ustream, YouTube or anywhere you have embed code offered and put it on the video page. It’s not as flexible as it hopefully will be in the future though – the pane that shows up beneath the video, does not automatically adjust to fit the video width, so we need to work on that. However, we can adjust that pane width after the chosen video (or service you will use) is added, to make the page look more polished. So that’s a minor inconvenience for now. Overall, I was thrilled with how adding a video and changing video codes work.

Watching Real-Time Conversations

A lot of people like to read and watch conversations without joining in, or they like to hop in and participate. We wanted this to be easy and so we added an auto-refreshing of the panes feature to Twitterface a few weeks ago. In reality, something we did not anticipate was our product producing api overage errors. We are going to have to work with Twitter to see what we can do about that. When an unknown number of people are hitting the page, and panes are refreshing every 20 seconds (or longer) it caused our limits to be hit quickly. I didn’t really know we had limits, as Twitterface is a whitelisted product, so to see this happen as the conference opened, at 4 am our time (Joe and I were up to make sure all went smoothly) nearly caused us a heart attack. What was frustrating is that we had tested this on Twitter the night before and this never happened – of course, there weren’t as many people hitting the page. Doh! We figured out that having a profile name up, instead of searches, would give tweets and not api errors so everytime we saw the api errors happening, we switched to a profile name. We’d like to thank @thebrandbuilder and @adders for being such great live tweeters as they saved our necks because we put their profiles on and still had some coverage.

Tweeting from the Page

Our product has its own login (it does not use oauth) and is meant for one person to use, like your Twitter account on the web works. But we wanted people to be able to send tweets from this page without having to leave it, and we wanted it to be secure as possible and use Twitter’s oauth mechanism. So hooking that up, in conjunction with our tool being architected like it is, was a hurdle we had to get over. With the help of our developer Tom Jenkins, who now has a dayjob but graciously did work for us in his spare time on this, we managed to get a working oauth widget on the page, and though it had a few display bugs (the page had to be refreshed if the widget box didn’t work right) it worked and you could tweet from the page.

Links to Conference Information

One of the initial features of Twitterface was links to real sites in the footer, to make navigating to other places easy. The conference organizers added their schedule, a link to ways to participate, a link to add photos to a Flickr pool and links to their sites at the bottom of the page, and we used that Schedule link constantly to adjust the page settings… we put the speaker’s name beneath the video as they were about to speak and changed that pane when they went to lunch to keep people in the loop about what was going on in Exeter.

Delivering Live Blog Feeds

Like Minds had two official live bloggers using a service called CoveritLive to do real-time coverage of the day. Our dream was to drive these feeds, since they had an RSS feed, into the page but we needed a way to do it. The awesome @dlvrit service saw my pleas for help on Twitter and gave us the PERFECT solution. I was so happy. Unfortunately, you can’t test CoveritLive without them going live, so what we did not know was that our solution was not going to work. Until we were Live and in front of thousands of people, of course. The RSS feed produced only some sort of timestamp, not actual coverage, so later in the day we discovered @adders was blogging live, and tweeting also about his live posts, and so we switched to his tweets and it helped so much. We love http://dlvr.it and will work with them in the future on live event feeds though – they supported us above and beyond what we anticipated and their tool is excellent.

Providing an Online Experience

Despite all the technical problems and glitches, one thing we seemed to actually deliver on was providing a great online experience for virtual attendees. This is important, because Like Minds and we at Fresh ID want to come up with ways to do paid attendance to certain events in the future. So a good experience is very key to this working at all. Throughout the day, attendees watching the Twitterface page seemed to have good things to say about it – like they felt like they were in Exeter, that they loved watching it online, that it was so good to be able to watch it live they felt they could cry. In reality, you can go to Ustream and watch a live event. And of course you can set up hashtags and things in your own Twitter client and keep an eye on things that way. But what we wanted to create was an extension of the Live Event, and that means branding. That means attention to detail, and focused conversations, and cutting out the noise. So I think what worked for people, and the reason we’ve created the product, is that they were attending a branded experience online, because they couldn’t be at the real event in person, and they felt the connection because it was planned, branded and constantly monitored to ensure a smooth experience and really, the best one we could give them despite technical issues that gave the Fresh ID team headaches all day long.

So, the net result of the day was pretty positive, both at the event, and on Twitter from what we could tell. Here are some things we’ve learned, that will affect our product offering and future events:

  • Events must be monitored every single minute, by someone. I got up at 4 am because in the UK they were going to start around 10 am. Joe had stayed up – it was 2 am his time in California, and thank goodness we did get up/stay up because the api limit issue would have made this page unusable had we not started making changes to refresh times and adjusting pane settings to not display the error when it happened. The opening of Like Minds was smooth and fun there it seemed, but it was a nightmare for us and drove home the continual monitoring issue, which we had not planned for. I’d had two hours sleep because of getting the page finished Thursday night, so though I didn’t plan to stay up, it wasn’t optional. My team was also not around – Joe eventually went to bed and Lisa and Matt were en route to meetings and the office. So during their lunch, I got ready very quickly and drove to my office to continue monitoring until Matt got there, and then he took over the rest of the day. We will be offering this as a service to companies who need it, but people who do not hire us to do this DEFINITELY need to plan to have a person attending the page and making constant adjustments to keep things flowing.
  • One of the things Like Minds did to us was use video from two different ustream channels, which I sort of figured out on my own. LOL! We did not have a member of their web team on a phone speed dial or even Twitter.  I mostly worked with Scott Gould to set this up, one of the founders and event organizers, and I didn’t want to bother him because I knew he was busy at the event. Fortunately, I happened to notice he had streamed from both a LikeMinds and a ScottGould ustream channel, so if one went off-air we checked the other to make sure we weren’t missing something. But we needed communication with a member of the tech team there – it would have helped us know what was going on and when they were going to stream or not stream.
  • We have to talk to Twitter directly about these api issues, and we’ve never worked with them directly. Fortunately for me, I am making that Lisa’s job. Haha! I hope we can get that improved, but if not, we know how to get around it during an event.
  • The official hashtag for Like Minds is @wearelikeminds, but no one tweeted from it all day and we needed it when we had to switch from a search to profile views only because of api issues. I really recommend that you assign someone to tweet from the official account – even if you have to ask a participant to do it and hand over the login temporarily. For people wondering what is going on, that would make a big difference and it would have solved some of our problems doing this live offering also.
  • The presentations could not be viewed behind the presenter, but with some adjustments they could have been. We are going to design a combo video/slideshare page I think, but it would have been very nice if the presentation had been dropped down behind the presenter (almost even with his feet) so online viewers could see the slides and hear the person talk at the same time – in fact, that would totally rock!
  • Organizing the remote event team, with the team on the ground, for fast communication via skype or twitter makes sense. We will make sure to do this in the future. I actually think it helps for the remote monitoring team NOT to be at the event, to minimize distractions. It is too easy to have to put out fires at the event and lose track of monitoring this page – for us, our sole job was to watch the page, fix issues and keep things flowing online, and we were not hit up with other issues that took focus off of that task by being in the building where it was happening.
  • When Like Minds broke for lunch, there was no Ustream feed for at least an hour and a half. I think we lost some online viewers then. I know that in the future Scott wants to enable video at the lunchtime talk sessions – that would have helped, or even having an event take place on stage (maybe one of the lunches is done there) would have helped not break the momentum of online viewing. I loved the lunch idea though – they had numerous mini-sessions over lunch at different restaurants around the city! Such a cool idea. Attendees got to choose the type of food, speaker and type of conversation they wanted to have.
  • One of the things I noticed, was that this conference WAS very pleasant to attend online. When I got up at 4 am I was still in bed. So here I was in my jammies, comfortably propped up on pillows in the dark, while everyone in England was looking dapper and had makeup on and their hair done. Yet I was learning the same cool information they were – it was REALLY pleasant! And watching the tweets from people actually there, plus being able to tweet without leaving the page was very nice. This is an experience I would want to repeat at tons of other events… not just conferences, but musical events or education of some type – it really did work like I envisioned it, aside from our little issues (which we will find a way to make better!)

We were very pleased with the analytics behind spreading the word about the event Twitterface page. One thing we did at the 11th hour was a press release, informing folks that this would be a live event online. We definitely want to do that earlier than midnight before the event, next time. LOL! Because that press release was picked up by numerous sources – Lisa has the exact count. We’ve had over half a million potential tweet impressions of the twitterface.com/likeminds2010 link, and 75o of the aggregated bit.ly link for that url, and it was mentioned online in blogs, on Twitter and on Facebook in more conversations that I don’t have a number count for. We had over 660 people watching the page it seems, from Google Analytics. That number is important, because only 300 people or so could attend the actual event in Exeter before it was sold out (and it was sold out.) So they increased attendance twice over in online attendees – pretty cool!!

I want to thank all of the people on Twitter who helped us test this page with a live ustream video of race cars in the wee hours Thursday night. I wish I could give you all a present – you helped us so much and we’re very grateful you took the time to test the tweeting and video watching for us.

We have had many inquiries about doing this for other events, including SXSW which is coming up soon. Contact us and let’s talk about hooking this up for your event! We’d love to keep experimenting with what we’re doing and perfect the kinks in the process.

In the coming days we’ll be hearing from someone who attended the event virtually (@brandguardian is writing a blog post) and I am eager to hear what others thought, so if you watched our Twitterface page during the event Friday and want to share your experience, please let us know in the comments!

WordPress vs. Tumblr – A Simple Overview

Posted January 29th, 2010 in Art of Blogging, Products | 3 Comments

The ever evolving world of blog platforms can be confusing so we try to help our clients understand the basic differences between the options they are considering.  Much of the discussion regarding platform benefits is often slanted from a developers point of view, making it a bit frustrating and hard to understand for someone who isn’t living in the coding world. Therefore, we created this quick and easy overview to help our non-techy friends grasp the “so what” of both platforms. We would love to hear from you on what we need to add or simplify even further.

Functionality & Control

A WordPress site can easily be expanded to replace your current site if you choose. WordPress is a robust Content Management System that has an easy user back-end that allows for page, plug-in, widget and sidebar updates to be made by non-tech experts. WordPress can support multi-page navigation and serve as a robust and comprehensive website with database management and control.  WordPress is hosted on a server that is user controlled allowing better control over stats and personalization. We are actually switching many corporate sites done in asp or html to WordPress so that marketers, customer support and others in the organization can update content immediately, instead of having to wait for the marcom or IT department to update site pages for them. WordPress has the advantage of being installed on your own server.

Tumblr cannot be installed on your server… a site is hosted on the Tumblr platform, though you can use a unique url instead of the subdomain.tumblr.com address. You have complete control over your content, and can export it and move it to another platform if you want to take it off of Tumblr. For some reasons why we love Tumblr, read this older post called, aptly, Why Tumblr? that Kristi we published some months ago.

Cost and Usability

Tumblr is typically cheaper as it does not require the installation and configuration that WordPress does – the cost for hosting a Tumblr site is free, and our cost for custom Tumblr design is less expensive than it is for a custom WordPress theme, because it is much simpler to code (also more limited.) Tumblr offers an extremely user friendly dashboard that makes updating posts easy for text and multimedia alike.  Tumblr is also easy to update from your mobile device.

WordPress also offers a fairly simple to use back-end and supports multiple media formats. The cost of the WordPress platform is free, but custom design and hosting is not. (You can use wordpress.com for free, I think, but your functionality and design choices are much more limited.)

Design, Customization and Integration

With WordPress you can create different layouts for internal pages, posts and your homepage.  Tumblr on the other hand is limited with one type of page layout that must be applied on every page on the site, and the url’s for those pages are really ugly – this is the one for “About Kristi“ from her personal site.) WordPress supports widgets/plug-ins that can easily be added/customized without hard coding vs. Tumblr that must be custom coded for pseudo plug-in functionality. WordPress allows you to include native calendars and contact pages which mean you can update them all from the same WordPress back-end. Tumblr can support calendar and contact pages but only from third party sites that requires a separate log-in from the Tumblr back-end and some trick coding.

Search Engine Optimization, Ads and Performance

WordPress is very friendly with the search engines and can be easily optimized with various plug-ins added to the back-end. WordPress can also easily support ads which can be placed in different places on different pages as you choose.  WordPress also has clean code in the back-end which allows for faster performance providing a better user experience.

Tumblr and SEO is not something we know how to optimize at present. We are researching it. There are some trick coding ways you can do ads, but nothing straightforward.

Bottom line: we recommend WordPress to some clients, and Tumblr to others. It depends on what you want to do, who your audience is, what your technical threshold is for learning, and who is going to be using the site to write content. Both are great platforms in their own right, and we will continue to provide services for both. What do you use for your sites or blog? Tell us in the comments!

My Favorite Prototyping Tools

Posted October 5th, 2008 in Design, Products | 21 Comments

A user interface designer relies on certain things: a fast, working internet connection, a big enough screen to handle the inevitable hopping back and forth from one window to another, some excellent music, and a steady supply of his or her favorite addictive beverage of choice… in my case, coffee or Coke Classic.

But those are just the accoutrement needed to set the stage. An interaction designer must rely on one or more tools with which to turn the brilliance bursting forth from highly stimulated and caffeinated synapses, into pure bottom line revenue. Well, ideally at least.

I have my staples, those products I cannot and will not live without, which happen to all be owned by the same company these days. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver have fueled the development of most software products I have worked on. Though they will always be used for my ultimate design and final polishing, I’ve recently discovered a few products that make creating a prototype almost as easy as having a thought, and I want to share these finds in case other user experience professionals or developers looking to prototype new features might benefit from them.

 


Balsamiq Mockups Makes Rapid Prototyping Fun!

I happened onto Balsamiq Mockups via a Twitter comment by Alex Horstmann about how great this product is. One of the big back-and-forth debates among information architects and user experience designers is the level of prototype that should be created and presented. Info architects generally rely on wireframes… the outlining of sections and navigation elements and the like. People who design the product line branding and comprehensive user experience like I do, often go whole-hog and want to communicate all their creative ideas, along with the taxonomy, navigation, etc. It can be time-consuming to do that, and sometimes even a visual designer just needs to show a simple feature interaction concept. Historically, I love to sketch with pencil and paper. It’s been the fastest way for me to work a design problem out for myself. But then I usually want or need to share it with developers, and I have a sketch. Do I scan it, recreate it using one of my standard tools, or just get on the phone and describe it???

With Balsamiq Mockups, I can grab and place “sketchy” elements such as dropdowns, icons and other form elements onto a blank notebook page online, then save and send it to my team. Peldi Guilizzoni, owner of Balsamiq and developer of the product, sets a new standard for customer service, which is one reason why this product will always draw raves from me, despite my occasional gripes about Adobe Air, which is the platform the product is built upon. Meet Peldi and you will agree with me. This product was and is “designed for users” by Peldi himself. If you have a problem, he strives to fix it, and uses the excellent Get Satisfaction site to stay in constant contact with users who need help. If you have a request, Peldi will seriously consider it, usually implement it, and if he cannot or shouldn’t, he provides the research behind his decision and fully explains why not. That is RARE, even in this day of more transparent and more open applications.

And now maybe Peldi will know why it took me so long to put this review up – I can’t stop blathering on about how great he is with his customers, and stay focused on the software itself, which is why you’re here. So go see the software for yourself!

>> Try it now, before you buy it!
>> Twitter Balsamiq

 


Skitch Takes Screenshots to a New Level of Convenience

Working with software, I’ve taken a lot of screenshots. I’ve taken them into Photoshop and refashioned them completely, I’ve drawn circles and put giant pink #ff3399;">“Please do not do this!!” messages on them, and I have often had to take multiple shots of a long web screen and then put together the hacked up pieces in a Photoshop file so I can have the long screen to work on or annotate. Thankfully, a new Adobe Air tool called Websnapshot has eliminated that issue, as long as you have a direct link to point to.

But Skitch, though it doesn’t take a screenshot of the entire web page, does so much more, that it is well worth the money you don’t have to pay for it. It’s in Beta and Free as of this writing. Here’s what Skitch does, brilliantly and easily: find something you need to take a screenshot of, open the Skitch application, snap the portion of the screen you want, draw circles, boxes and write notes on it to explain your issue, post it to your online account, then share the link with the people you choose. Nathen Harvey, Director of Operations at VisualCV, turned me onto this modern miracle. He uses it to communicate with users and developers, because he can snap a screen and put notes on it and distribute it within minutes. The ability to post a screenshot online and grab the link to send in an email, rather than having to save and send an attachment from your own hard disk space is truly awesome. Learn the lingo and try it! I love this tool.

>> It’s free… nothing to lose but a moment of time. Try it!
>> Twitter Skitch
>> See Nathen’s Skitch Message Online


GUIMags & GUIMagnets Makes Whiteboard Collaboration Productive Beyond the Meeting

Gathering in a conference room, brainstorming with smart people, the smell of fresh markers permeating the air… nothing beats it (sometimes!) But after hours spent in a conference room, what do you have? A lot of stuff on a whiteboard that has to be transcribed, remembered and implemented immediately, or all the hours of work are at risk of being lost forever.

Enter these little whiteboard magnets that are so obvious, you’ll wonder how you lived without them all these years. I love the GUImags story… the lead designer had some carpal tunnel issues, and was stuck at home healing. He used refrigerator magnets to make interface elements, and the Eureka! moment struck him: he needed magnets of interface elements to make design faster and easier. (And less physically debilitating!)

GUIMagnets is a similar product of laminated form elements. Rik Schot, a User Experience Designer in Nederland, was working on a website form (and no doubt, making frequent changes) when he realized there had to be a better way to prototype.

Now, there is a trick to this – you will have to take pictures and distribute them of the whiteboard designs, until GUImags partners with someone like Polyvision or Scanr, or designs a unique solution themselves. Output of the meeting is a critical element of this process and I hope they will come up with a full solution soon, because I think this could be a really valuable product in team settings. GUIMags mentions several other products coming soon that will aid your prototyping & collaboration: GUIBoards is a neat whiteboard with built-in resolution sizes that looks like a helpful concept.

GUIMagnets are sold on a laminated sheet, but GUImags come in a little briefcase – you’ll look so official when you show up for meetings! ;-)

>> Learn more about GUIMags
>> Learn more about GUIMagnets

 

Additional Products for User Interface Designers


Gliffy Does Diagrams in a Jiffy!

I so couldn’t help that headline. :-) But Gliffy does seem really cool. I have known about them for several years, and they’ve rebranded themselves to focus on using their tool for online wireframing, diagrams, storyboards, etc. This tool is easy to use and would really come in handy for professional sitemaps and interaction flowcharts. They offer a free one-month trial, and paid subscriptions following that. I haven’t tried the wireframing options they offer, but it looks pretty neat. Check them out.

 


Dabbleboard – A Powerful Online Whiteboard

I just discovered Dabbleboard but have only dabbled in it so far… it takes a bit of getting used to. The concept is really cool though – you can draw online, instead of offline using pencil and paper, and then show your lovely sketches to others much quicker than you could sketch, scan and send.

I tried making a user interface as lovely as the Dappleboard example shown here, but couldn’t in the few minutes I spent with the product. I think you have to add some elements or something from this UI Toolkit. I’ll explore the product more when I have time. For me, Balsamiq Mockups was faster and easier to get started with, but Dabbleboard has one key thing I like, which is the idea of drawing electronically so I can avoid the step of scanning, or recreating sketches in a full-blown prototype before showing them to people. You don’t have to sign up to play, which is awesome, so try Dabbleboard out today and let me know what you think.

Have I missed any other cool prototyping or user interface-related products? I’d love to hear about them if you use something not mentioned here!
 

How to Use EchoSign & VisualCV to Create a Private Portfolio Process

Posted August 3rd, 2008 in Products | 0 Comments

The Business Problem: You’re a designer, engineer, architect, musician, writer or another type of professional who needs to have prospective clients sign an NDA prior to viewing certain work samples or information.

The Fresh Solution: VisualCV + EchoSign Accelerate the Process!

EchoSign is an effective way to have documents (like an NDA) signed electronically. The cost is free for 5 signatures a month, with Pro, Team & Enterprise plans available that range from $12.95 to $299 per month. You simply prepare your documents in Microsoft Word, Excel, WordPerfect, Text or PDF, upload, and send them via an email form to one or more people. When all the signatures are collected, EchoSign will send copies to everyone as well as save a copy in your online account. A pretty valuable service, for businesses of all sizes… in fact, it’s even integrated into Salesforce so sales folks can close deals more quickly.

But combined with a private VisualCV, you can create a powerful process that might help turn that prospect into a client, faster than ever before. Here’s how this works:

With this solution, you have a couple of options for sending the prospect to your private portfolio once they’ve signed the NDA:

• When you get the email receipt for the signed NDA, log into visualcv.com and “Share” it to send an email to your prospect that will contain a secure link to your VisualCV.

• Send the private VisualCV automatically using an autoresponder. You will need to first share it from within the system (send it to your own email address) to generate the secure link, which you can use in other emails. Create an autoresponder in your email program that will automatically email that special link to your prospect once the form is signed. (You may have to create a new autoresponder for each prospect, unless you can define some scripting actions that will make the process work based on emails or subject lines.)

That’s it! Imagine the other possibilities for round-trip processes and electronic approvals that you could design with EchoSign to make your life easier or your sales efforts more effective. You could…

• Receive an RFP -> Send a Proposal -> Receive a Signed Contract

• Send Offer to Applicant -> Receive Acceptance -> Send New Hire Policies -> Receive Signature

• Send & Receive Legal, Medical, Financial, Insurance or Real Estate Documents (to name a few)

• Get new hires onboard with an HR document pack in 10 minutes flat (like EchoSign does)

Get the tools and let me know what you think!

>> VisualCV
>> EchoSign
>> Mutual Non-Disclosure Sample

Visual CV: 8 Reasons Every Job Applicant Needs One

Posted July 31st, 2008 in Products | 4 Comments

I recently wrote about visual resumes, and asked recruiters on Linked In if they felt they would be more effective than a traditional resume or not, with mixed comments.

After that big post, I discovered Visual CV, a free (as of right now at least) hosted web application that makes putting together a visual resume EASY. I spent some time this morning putting mine together, and I am hooked. Here’s why:

1 | The interface is intuitive enough to use without help – always a plus for never-before-seen-or-used software.

2 | The CV sections are completely customizable, draggable, and easy to add or delete.

3 | The presentation is nice and clean. Though I wish I could insert my own brand elements, the three options for the resume design are pleasant enough to look at.

4 | You can pack all the information a company or recruiter might ever need, into one nice page.

5 | Your resume can be shared, forwarded, printed or saved as a PDF.

6 | You can quickly insert photos, video, diagrams, documents, links and anything else you can think of to help create a great impression. (Check out Guy Kawasaki’s resume!)

7 | The nature of it being hosted for you online, plus the ease of editing, makes it a living document… change it any time you think of something that would make it better!

8 | Sending a link takes much less bandwidth in a talent manager’s inbox than a resume attachment. They can check it out, easily forward it, and let you know if they’d like more information or an electronic document.

Being a user experience designer, I do have a few, teeny requests of things I wish they’d add or fix:

• The executive resume design bothers me. It doesn’t feel quite as “smooth” as the other two.

• I didn’t see an option for recruiters to access a Word doc or plain text option, though you could add one to your portfolio and create a section for it or link to it.

• I cannot help but want more advanced options for branding the design of the resume to make it my own. :-)

• I long for web stats so I can see who has been checking out my resume. (UPDATE: stats are there – I just missed them before!)

• There is either a bug, or a hiccup in Safari on the Mac, with the text being copied/pasted. It didn’t always come in at the same size, and I had to hit return and back up several times, to make it all the same size. A size option for the text would be a nice addition to the Bold, Italic, etc. options.

My resume is a work in progress, but feel free to check it out, and while you’re there, create one of your own! http://www.visualcv.com/kristicolvin/

And if you are a hiring manager or recruiter and would like to fill out my brief survey on whether or not a visual resume can be effective for applicants, please do!

What Does Celltop Cost on Your Alltel Phone?

Posted June 26th, 2008 in Mobile, Products | 4 Comments

Celltop_cellsSo many people are searching every day for the costs associated with Alltel’s Celltop feature, and finding the design critique on the Celltop user experience I recently posted, that I felt I should provide specific pricing information if possible. I have done some more research about the cost of using Celltop on your Alltel phone. Maybe this can be my good deed for the day. :-)

Please note, this information is from the software on my LG Scoop phone, which appears to be different than the software in screenshots on the Alltel site, so the pricing and application information is subject to change. (And not all applications are available on all Alltel phones.)

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